Reduce horizontal spacing between icons in GNOME 3.2

One thing that annoys me about the default GNOME shell is the amount of horizontal space it wastes in between icons/indicators in the status area (top right on the panel).

Urgh look how much space is between all the icons!

I wrote a very simple GNOME shell extension to fix this. (My first ever! More an exercise in how to do it than anything else).

It's available for one-click install from extensions.gnome.org. The repository (for anyone interested in the code) is here.

If for some reason you don't want to/can't install from extensions.gnome.org, you can go to the 'Downloads' page and download the .zip file. Then start gnome-tweak-tool, select "Shell Extensions", "Install Shell Extensions", and choose the .zip file. Restart the gnome-shell, enable the extension, and you're all done!

The result?

Nice and slim

Voila! Enjoy :)

What it Does

It basically just modifies these lines from the file /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css:

.panel-button {
    -natural-hpadding: 12px;
    -minimum-hpadding: 6px;
    /* ... and so on */
}

The attribute -natural-hpadding is set by default to 12 pixels wide. My extension sets this to 6 pixels wide (you can modify this if you want; just change the relevant lines in stylesheet.css that comes with the extensions).

If you set -naturial-hpadding below 6 pixels you will have to adjust -minimum-hpadding to match it too.