Saturday, January 26, 2019

Making Telegram fit the elementary OS Design

Telegram has been my main messaging platform of choice for a few years now. Recently, I made the switch of platform from Windows 10 to elementary OS. The reasons behind it may warrant a different post but for now the focus is on Telegram. I wanted to make it look more at home on elementary so I started working on a custom theme last night.

Today, I think I can safely say that I've tweaked it enough to a usable state that I can now share it with the world. Below are some screenshots to show how it looks like in general.


To install it, first, download the theme file from my GitHub.
[sprite-1_elementary_v1.1.tdesktop-theme]

  1. Click the hamburger menu on the top right of the telegram desktop client.
  2. Go to Settings > Chat Settings.
  3. Under the Chat background section, click Choose from file and select the theme file.
  4. Telegram will ask you if you want to keep the theme, just click the Keep Changes button.
For the final touch, if you scroll down a bit after applying the theme, you can change the emoji set to Android to match the system emoji used by elementary OS.

I would love to get some feedback so tell me if something is broken or looks off and I'll look into it.

P.S. If you want the thinner title bars for non-GTK apps too, refer to this page. I update it whenever I find some new tweak for elementary OS.