Hide System Icons (GNOME Extension)

Hide specific system icons from the GNOME Quick Settings panel.

Install

Install from GNOME Extensions: Hide System Icons

Compatibility

• Modern (ESM): GNOME Shell 45–51
• Legacy (legacy loader): GNOME Shell 40–44

Features

• Hardware: hide volume, hide microphone, hide network, hide Bluetooth, hide airplane mode, hide Thunderbolt
• Display & Appearance: hide brightness, hide keyboard backlight, hide night light, hide dark mode, hide auto rotate
• Privacy & System: hide camera, hide location, hide screen sharing, hide power, hide power profiles, hide Do Not Disturb (GNOME 49+), hide background apps
• Changes apply immediately and persist across restarts

Settings

Preferences: Extensions app → this extension → Preferences. Toggles are grouped:

• Hardware: hide volume, hide microphone, hide network, hide Bluetooth, hide airplane mode, hide Thunderbolt
• Display & Appearance: hide brightness, hide keyboard backlight, hide night light, hide dark mode, hide auto rotate
• Privacy & System: hide camera, hide location, hide screen sharing, hide power, hide power profiles, hide Do Not Disturb (GNOME 49+), hide background apps

"Hide all" / "Show all" at the top of the page apply to every toggle at once. Hiding the camera, microphone, location or screen sharing indicator asks for confirmation first (those icons are your only on-screen sign the sensor is in use) — "Hide all" offers a "Keep privacy icons" option for exactly this reason.

GSettings (advanced):

• Schema: org.gnome.shell.extensions.hide-system-icons
• Keys:
  • hide-volume (boolean)
  • hide-microphone (boolean)
  • hide-camera (boolean)
  • hide-location (boolean)
  • hide-remote-access (boolean)
  • hide-network (boolean)
  • hide-bluetooth (boolean)
  • hide-rfkill (boolean)
  • hide-thunderbolt (boolean)
  • hide-brightness (boolean)
  • hide-backlight (boolean)
  • hide-night-light (boolean)
  • hide-dark-mode (boolean)
  • hide-auto-rotate (boolean)
  • hide-power (boolean)
  • hide-power-profiles (boolean)
  • hide-do-not-disturb (boolean)
  • hide-background-apps (boolean)

Manual installation (from source)

Prerequisites:

• make, zip, glib-compile-schemas
• Node.js and npm

npm install

# Build both modern (45–51) and legacy (40–44) packages
make pack

# Or build individually
make pack-modern
make pack-legacy

# Install the modern build (45–51) to ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
make install-modern

# Install the legacy build (40–44) to ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
make install-legacy

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup, testing and how to add a hideable icon.

Releasing

The project follows Semantic Versioning, and package.json holds the version.

1. Add your changes under ## [Unreleased] in CHANGELOG.md.
2. On an up-to-date main with a clean working tree, run npm version patch, npm version minor or npm version major. This bumps the version, dates the changelog section, commits chore(release): vX.Y.Z and creates the vX.Y.Z tag.
3. Run git push --follow-tags.

Pushing the tag runs the release workflow. It builds hide-system-icons-X.Y.Z-gnome-45-51.zip and hide-system-icons-X.Y.Z-gnome-40-44.zip and publishes them as a GitHub release, with the changelog section as the release notes. Uploading to extensions.gnome.org is still manual.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.