Aurora Shell

A modular GNOME Shell extension that adds quality-of-life features missing in vanilla GNOME.

Aurora Shell is distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 only. See LICENSE and CREDITS.md for licensing and attribution details.

Project goal: Aurora Shell is a proving ground. Over time, the aim is for some of its features to mature and make their way upstream into GNOME Shell itself. Modules here are meant to be useful on their own today and good candidates for upstream tomorrow.

Modules

Aurora is split into independent modules, so you can enable only what you want.

Dock & Panel

• Dock - replaces the stock dash with a per-monitor dock that always auto-hides by default, with optional intellihide and always-visible modes, edge reveal, Trash, and removable drive shortcuts.
• Aurora Menu - adds an Aurora panel menu with recent items, useful shortcuts, configurable panel icon, optional Activities button hiding, and a custom command slot.
• Volume Mixer - adds per-application volume sliders to Quick Settings with fast access to Sound Settings.
• Low Battery Percentage - uses GNOME's native battery percentage setting while the battery is discharging below 20%, without overriding users who already enabled it.
• Lock Key Indicators - shows Caps Lock and Num Lock indicators in the top panel.
• Bluetooth Menu - shows battery level and animated icons in the Bluetooth Quick Settings panel.
• Weather Clock - shows GNOME Weather next to the panel clock, with configurable placement before or after the clock.
• Meeting Clock - shows upcoming calendar events next to the panel clock, supports meeting alerts, snooze timing, lookahead controls, all-day event filtering, and events without join links.
• Tray Icons - adds a system tray for SNI app icons and GNOME background apps, with configurable icon limit, icon size, attention timeout, symbolic icon recoloring, background-app deduplication, and optional Quick Settings background-app hiding.

Appearance

• Theme Changer - keeps GNOME light/dark color scheme behavior consistent.
• Icon Weave - automatically fixes missing app icons by matching untracked windows to their apps in memory.
• App Search Tooltip - shows app names on hover in the overview search results.
• Auto Theme Switcher - automatically switches between light and dark theme based on configured times.

Behavior

• Skip Overview on Login - skips the overview on startup so GNOME Shell opens directly to the desktop.
• Pip On Top - keeps Picture-in-Picture windows above other windows automatically.
• Focus Launched Windows - focuses newly launched windows instead of showing window-ready notifications.
• Capture Tools - adds a Gradia-style floating annotation toolbar to the top of GNOME's screenshot interface as soon as it opens, with drawing, shapes, text, numbered annotations, annotated export, and optional local Tesseract OCR.
• XWayland Indicator - adds an X11 badge to XWayland apps in the Alt+Tab switcher.

Privacy & Clipboard

• Privacy - adds screen sharing privacy features, including automatic Do Not Disturb and panel content hiding.
• Clipboard History - adds searchable clipboard history with pinning, keyboard navigation, configurable polling, and a user-assigned shortcut.

All modules can be toggled independently from the extension preferences.

Requirements

• GNOME Shell 50+
• Tesseract with the desired language data (optional, for Capture Tools OCR)
• Node.js 20+
• Yarn 4+
• just (command runner)

Installation

From extensions.gnome.org (Recommended)

The easiest way to install is from the official GNOME Extensions website.

From command-line

Download the latest aurora-shell@luminusos.github.io.shell-extension.zip file from the GitHub releases page, then install it:

gnome-extensions install --force aurora-shell@luminusos.github.io.shell-extension.zip
gnome-extensions enable aurora-shell@luminusos.github.io

Stable releases, release candidates, and nightly pre-releases publish two assets:

• aurora-shell@luminusos.github.io.shell-extension.zip — production package recommended for regular installations;
• aurora-shell@luminusos.github.io.development.shell-extension.zip — DevTool-enabled package for contributors, QA, and development sessions.

Do not use the development package as a regular desktop installation.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for information on project architecture, code style, and step-by-step instructions on how to add a new module.

Credits & Acknowledgements

Aurora Shell builds on the work of the wider GNOME community. Special thanks to:

• maniacx/Bluetooth-Battery-Meter the animated Bluetooth icons used by the Bluetooth Menu module come from this project.
• CleoMenezesJr/weather-oclock inspired the Weather Clock module.
• danmoz/meetingtime inspired the Meeting Clock module.
• swsnr/gnome-shell-extension-xwayland-indicator the inspiration behind the XWayland Indicator module.
• AlexanderVanhee/gradia-capture inspired the Capture Tools annotation workflow.
• SamkitJain660/Shotzy inspired the local screenshot OCR workflow.
• Orsso/d2d-companion is the source of the adapted Dock motion behavior.

See CREDITS.md for the full list of attributed work.