Synchronize gnome 3 (panel) settings between computers

dconfgnome-classicgnome-panelgnome3gsettings

I'd like to synchronize the configuration of my gnome panel(s) between computers and keep the configuration in Git. How can I dump / import the necessary information? I already found gconftool2 --dump but did not find anything that looked like my panel configuration inside.

Update: I'm using gnome3 classic mode (together with xmonad as window-manager). I found the configuration setting with the dconf-editor below org.gnome.gnome-panel.layout. It's however still cumbersome to come up with the correct shell scripting to extract and sync only the configuration that I want to share.

I've opened a wishlist issue in the gnome bugzilla for a dconf sync tool: 710930

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Updated answer

With dconf (which you are using), gnome-panel's config can be dumped out with the following command:

dconf dump /org/gnome/gnome-panel/layout > settings.txt

Then you can edit the file (it's plain text file) to contain only the settings you want to sync, and then load the settings from the file as following:

dconf load /org/gnome/gnome-panel/layout < settings.txt

Original answer

I think gconftool should work well. The following command will dump gnome-panels settings (from directory ~/.gconf/apps/panel) to .xml file called backup.xml: gconftool --dump /apps/panel > backup.xml.

Then do the following to load configs from backup.xml: gconftool --load backup.xml.

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Gnome menu panel blank space

As far as I can see from the screenshot, it could be either of two things.

It doesn't look like the spacing between icons as defined by gnome is off, but just to make sure, you could run:

gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel/padding 0
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel/padding 0
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/applets/systray/prefs/padding 0

The other possibility is that due to a resolution change your icons on the panel got stuck out of position. This is really annoying, and if the icons are locked they won't automatically swap back into place when you switch to the previous res. This happens a lot with dynamically resizable VMs.
To deal with this, make sure that the icons are unlocked (right click, untick "Lock") and then move them back to where they belong.

Please let us know if this resolved your issue.
Regards.

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Gnome menu panel blank space

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