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Yesterday I wrote about 10 Awesome Mac OS X Snow Leopard Wallpapers, today I will share a Snow Leopard Theme Folders pack for your Mac OS X.This pack contains 46 icons at 512 x 512 px each and includes both iContainer and PNG formats. You can use these icons to replace the default icons in your Mac OS X operating system. A step-by-step guide for making Ubuntu look like a mac, covering everything from GTK theme and icon set to fonts and desktop docks.
Visual Studio for Mac can be customized, allowing users to develop apps in an environment that meets their needs for both efficiency and aesthetics. This article explores the variety of ways that Visual Studio for Mac can be adapted to suit your needs.
Dark theme
You can switch themes in Visual Studio for Mac by browsing to Visual Studio > Preferences > Environment > Visual Style and selecting your desired theme from the User Interface Theme drop-down, as illustrated in the following image:
Localization
Visual Studio for Mac is localized in the following 14 languages, enabling it to be accessible to more developers:
- Chinese - China
- Chinese - Taiwan
- Czech
- French
- German
- English
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Polish
- Portuguese - Brazil
- Russian
- Spanish
- Turkish
To change the language displayed by Visual Studio for Mac, browse to Visual Studio > Preferences > Environment > Visual Style and select your desired language from the User Interface Language drop-down, as illustrated in the following image:
Author information
The author information panel allows you to add relevant information about yourself such as your name, email address, the copyright owner for your work, your company, and trademark:
This information is used to populate standard file headers, such as a license, that you might add to new files:
Populated Name and Email fields will be used in any commit that is made through Version Control in Visual Studio for Mac. If you haven't populated these fields, Visual Studio for Mac will prompt you to do so when you try to use Version Control.
Key bindings
Key bindings, or keyboard shortcuts, allow you to adapt your development environment so that you can move more efficiently throughout Visual Studio for Mac. It provides familiar key bindings for many popular IDEs, such as Visual Studio (on Windows), ReSharper, Visual Studio Code, and Xcode.
Key bindings can be set by browsing to Visual Studio > Preferences > Environment > Key Bindings, as illustrated by the following image:
From here you can search for key binding combinations, view conflicting bindings, add new bindings, and edit the existing bindings.
These bindings can also be set during the initial setup of Visual Studio for Mac, via the Keyboard Selection screen:
Workspace layout
Visual Studio for Mac's workspace consists of a main document area (normally the editor, designer surface, or options file), surrounded by complimentary pads that contain useful information for accessing and managing application files, testing, and debugging.
Viewing and arranging pads
When you open any new solution or file in Visual Studio for Mac, you should notice some pads in the workspace, including the Solution Pad, Document Outline, and Errors:
Visual Studio for Mac provides pads containing additional information, tools, and navigation aids, all of which can be accessed by browsing to the View > Pads menu item and selecting a pad to add it:
Pads may also be opened automatically by various commands, such as the Find in Files (Shift + Cmd + F) command, which opens a detached pad of search results.
Pads can be moved and arranged throughout your workflow in whatever way is most useful to you. For example, they can be docked on any side of the document editor, adjacent to another pad, above or below another pad, or as a set of tabbed pads enabling you to quickly switch between them.
For frequently used pads, you can also completely detach a pad from the Visual Studio for Mac window, and create a separate window for that pad.
Pads can be hidden and closed by the toggles in the top-right corner of each pad:
Autohidden pads are docked to the sides of the workspace making them easily accessible when they are required. Hovering over the pad displays it again, and it will be hidden when the mouse and keyboard focus leaves it.
Organizing layouts
The pads that are displayed at any time are dependent on the current context. For example, when using the visual designer, the toolbox and property grid pads are most important; when debugging, it is useful to have the debugger pads for viewing the stack and locals.
The state of the open pads is represented by a layout. The layouts can be switched manually through the View menu, as illustrated in the following image, or it is switched automatically when you carry out an action, such as debugging, or opening a Storyboard:
There is always one active layout and any change you make in a layout, such as adding or repositioning a pad, will only change the active layout. Once you close Visual Studio for Mac, the changes you have made will not be saved.
However, it is possible to create a new layout by using the View > Save Current Layout menu item. This command will add your current layout to the menu so that you can select it at any time:
Side-by-side editing support
Visual Studio for Mac allows you to open text editors side by side, or to have an editor as a detached floating window.
Two-column mode can be enabled through the View menu item by selecting View > Editor Columns > 2 columns, or by dragging an editor tab to one of the edges of the editor area:
Editor tabs can be dragged out of the document area to create a floating editor window. This floating window also supports side-by-side editors, and can contain several editor tabs:
To revert to a single open editor, select View > Editor Columns > 1 column.
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See also
Do you want to make Ubuntu look like Mac OS X? If you do we’re going to show you how to do it, step-by-step.
The whole point of using Linux is that you can do things like this.
It doesn’t matter whether you have a bad case of Apple envy, or simply appreciate the design aesthetic of Apple’s OS; there’s nothing wrong with aping the appearance of a rival operating system.
Heck, the whole point of using Linux is that you are free to do things like this — after all, you certainly can’t make macOS look like Ubuntu!
How To Make Ubuntu Look like a Mac
A stack of mac GTK themes, icon sets, fonts and cursors are available for Linux, just a quick Google away.
The ones we include list below are the ones we use/think give you the best Mac-like look on your Linux box, but don’t be afraid to explore DeviantArt, Github and other avenues if our choices don’t suit your tastes.
1. Pick the Right Desktop Environment
GNOME Shell
To get the most Mac-like look on Linux you need to use the most appropriate desktop environment and that means you should use GNOME Shell.
That’s not a slight against other desktop environments (DEs) like Unity, Budgie, MATE or Cinnamon, as other Linux DEs can be moulded to resemble the Cupertino OS too.
But GNOME Shell is the most customisable desktop environment, which is something of a key ask in a task like this. GNOME Shell lets you theme and re-arrange everything you need to with the least amount hackery or fuss.
If you’re using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or later you already have everything you need to get started, so feel free to skip ahead.
But if you don’t have GNOME Shell installed on Ubuntu you will need to install it first.
To make this easy you can click the button below and follow in the on-screen prompts (select ‘lightdm’ as the display manager when asked):
You’re also going to need to the GNOME Tweaks tool in a few steps time, so install that now too:
Once both installations are complete you need to logout and select the ‘GNOME Shell’ session from the Unity Greeter:
A word on using Unity
One thing GNOME Shell can’t offer, that the Unity desktop can, is global menu support.
Now, I don’t consider this to be a negative as more and more applications use use Client Side Decorations, making the need for a global menu redundant.
But if having an omnipresent set of app menus stripped across the top of the screen is part of the Mac experience you don’t wish to lose, stick with Unity.
2. Install a Mac GTK Theme
The single easiest way to make Ubuntu look like a Mac is to install a Mac GTK theme.
Our top recommendation is the ‘macOS Mojave’ theme by Vinceluice. This is a near-enough pixel-perfect clone of Apple’s OS skin, and is available in light and dark versions. It’s one of the best designed Mac GTK themes out there (it also has a matching GNOME Shell theme).
The ‘macOS Mojave’ theme requires GNOME 3.20 or later, so you’ll need to be running Ubuntu 16.10 or later to use it.
If you’re running the older Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release you can use the competent ‘macOS Sierra’ clone created by the B00merang project:
Tip: How To Install GTK Themes
Once you download your chosen macOS theme from the link(s) above, you will need to install it.
To install themes in Ubuntu first extract the contents of the archive you downloaded, then move the folder inside to the
~/.themes
folder in your Home directory.If you do not see this folder press
Ctrl + H
to reveal hidden folders. Next, find the .themes folder or create it if it doesn’t exist. Move the extract folder mentioned above to this folder.Finally, to change theme, open
GNOME Tweak Tool > Appearance
and select your chosen theme (and the GNOME Shell theme, if you also downloaded one).3. Install a Mac Icon Set
Next grab some a Mac Icon set for Linux. A quick Google will throw up a bunch of results. Most, sadly, aren’t complete enough to function as a full icon set, so you’ll also want to use (and in some cases manually specify) a fall back icon theme like Faba, or Papirus.
To avoid all of that hassle you may wish to use the fabulous ‘La Capitaine‘ icon pack.
What’s great about La Capitaine is that it’s a proper Linux icon set, with custom macOS inspired icons for many Linux apps and not just a direct port of mac icons to Linux. It’s also totally open-source, and is available to download from Github.
How to Install Icon Themes
Once you’ve downloaded your chosen theme from the link(s) above you need to install it. To do this first extract the contents of the archive you download, then move the folder inside to the
~/.icons
folder in your Home directory.If you don’t see this folder press
Ctrl + H
to view hidden folders. Next, find the .icons folder or create it if it doesn’t exist. Move the extract folder mentioned above to this folder.Finally, to apply, open
GNOME Tweak Tool > Appearance
and select your chosen theme.4. Change the System Font
If you’ve used Mac OS X / macOS at some point in the past few years you’ll know it has clean, crisp system typography.
‘Lucida Grande’ is the familiar Mac system font, though Apple uses a system font called ‘San Franciso’ in recent releases of macOS.
A quick Google should turn up plenty more information (and links to download San Francisco font) but be aware that neither font is not licensed for distribution — so we can’t link you to it, sorry!
Thankfully there’s an open-source alternative to ‘Lucida Grande’ called Garuda. It’s even pre-installed out of the box on Ubuntu, so you don’t need to go on a font safari to find it.
Head to
GNOME Tweak Tool > Fonts
and set the ‘Windows Titles’ and ‘Interface’ fonts to Garuda Regular (or any other font you wish).If you use Unity you can use Unity Tweak Tool to change the font on Ubuntu.
5. Add a Desktop Dock
Ask people what a Mac desktop looks like and chances are they will mention its ubiqutious desktop dock. This is a combined application launcher and window switcher.
If you opted to use GNOME Shell back in Step 1 install the excellent Dash to Dock extension from the GNOME extensions site. This dock can be adjusted, tweaked and tune to look exactly like its macOS counterpart.
Dash to Dock doesn’t look very mac-ish by default so you will want to dive in to the
GNOME Tweak Tool > Extensions > Dash to Dock > Appearance
to change the colour to white, and lower the opacity.Plank Dock
If you chose to stick with the Unity desktop you can set the Unity Launcher to hide (
System Settings > Desktop > Behaviour
) and install Plank, a desktop dock, to handle app launching and window switching:Plank can be configured with all sorts of themes too, making it easy to replicate the Mac OS X experience. Gnosemite is a faithful mac Plank theme worth a look.
That’s it; we’ve achieved our aim to make Ubuntu look like a Mac — now it’s your turn.
We’d love to see a screenshot of your mac-inspired creation so do feel free to share one in the comments.