Starting a gnome-shell extension

Since I moved from Ubun­tu to Fe­do­ra ear­ly this year, I changed my desk­top en­vi­ron­ment from uni­ty to Gnome Shel­l.

I must say it is a great ex­pe­ri­ence. At the be­gin­ning I was think­ing on what was bet­ter com­pared to uni­ty (be­cause I did not like Uni­ty). Re­gard­ing this com­par­i­son I found a more sta­ble and us­able win­dow man­ag­er. I still pre­fer some­thing sim­pler per­hap­s, but it works good and it is nice.

Just out of cu­rios­i­ty, one day I start­ed man­ag­ing some ex­ten­sion­s. Oh, by the way, you will prob­a­bly be in­stalling some ex­ten­sions for Gnome shel­l, some of them are use­ful and some oth­ers make it more us­able. That drove me to the ex­ten­sions de­vel­op­er API, which turned out to be quite sim­ple and in­ter­est­ing.

Hav­ing played a lit­tle bit, I de­cid­ed to code a (very) sim­ple ex­ten­sion that does just one sin­gle thing. I called it “sim­ple-­name” and it is avail­able at: Sim­ple-­Name-Ex­ten­sion

It re­mem­bers some lit­tle de­tail I was miss­ing from some pre­vi­ous win­dow man­agers that I have used along the years, which is to dis­play the user­name of the cur­rent­ly logged-in us­er.

I must say that, I code it just for the sake of learn­ing and ex­per­i­ment­ing with and API and a bit of JavaScrip­t. In ad­di­tion I found very in­ter­est­ing to see fron­t-end re­lat­ed tech­nolo­gies like JavaScript or CSS used in the desk­top en­vi­ron­ment (not that is some­thing new, but still fun­ny).

To sum up, I want­ed to high­light that is in­ter­est­ing to learn new tech­nolo­gies, even with lit­tle and sim­ple steps like a new API, li­brary, etc. It is not for the tech­nol­o­gy it­self, but for the sake of learn­ing :)