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Let's say I have successully installed my set of gnome-shell extensions. But I want to deactivate/unactivate from the command line. This is only possible via mouse action, AFAIK.

How can I do that ?

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2 Answers 2

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50

It is well described in the Gnome wiki, quoting:

You can do this with the GSettings key, org.gnome.shell.enabled-extensions, or several tools that manipulate this GSettings key, such as GNOME Tweak Tool or a recent version of gnome-shell-extension-tool.

If you invoke gnome-shell-extension-tool --help, you will see that it is capable of enabling and disabling extensions by their name. For example, the following command enables user themes:

gnome-shell-extension-tool -e user-theme

Oh, and you can get the names of all your locally installed extensions by doing ls ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions. It will give you entries of the form the-name@author.

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  • 3
    It doesn't work if the extension has not been installed. It only changes the settings in dconf.
    – wayofthefuture
    Aug 2, 2017 at 20:13
  • 8
    In newer versions (I'm on 19.10), gnome-shell-extension-tool has been superseded by the more powerful gnome-extensions. This allows useful queries against the running env, eg: gnome-extensions list to get a list of installed extensions and gnome-extensions info $extension, where $extension can be obtained from the list
    – sxc731
    Nov 22, 2019 at 12:57
  • as you said "in newer versions" which means that not all distributions (I would dare to say still most distributions) don't have 'gnome-extensions' installed, some even don't have repos that contains 'gnome-extensions' by default
    – Ewoks
    Nov 10, 2020 at 9:23
  • is there a gui for this?
    – chovy
    Dec 29, 2020 at 10:09
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    @chovy GNOME Tweaks includes a section for managing extensions. Install gnome-tweaks, then launch the Tweaks application, then navigate to the "Extensions" tab.
    – Seth Falco
    Jul 23, 2022 at 19:07
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You can see a list of extensions installed with the following command

gnome-extensions list

From the list you can enable/disable any extension like this:

gnome-extensions enable user-theme@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com
gnome-extensions disable user-theme@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com

Notice the full extension name is needed.

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2
  • This way of doing is as of today gnome idiomatic, I do not know if I should update the answer
    – taharqa
    Apr 28, 2020 at 21:39
  • not all distribution has or make it easy to install 'gnome-extensions'
    – Ewoks
    Nov 10, 2020 at 9:23

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