How-To Reduce Space Between Icons in System Tray

If you would like to reduce the amount of space between the icons in the system tray, then follow the steps below.

Open your Terminal and enter the following: (You can replace gedit with your favorite text editor.)

sudo gedit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

Then press the Enter or Return key and type in your password. 

The gtk.css file should appear. My file has no code in it at the moment.

Copy and paste this code:

.mate-panel-menu-bar menuitem {
padding: 0 0px;
}

Then Save and exit your text editor.

Now reboot your system. When it loads, your icons should have less space between them.

Before

After

You can play around with the padding numbers in the gtk.css file until you get your desired results. Keep in mind that 0 indicates no padding, so increase the number gradually and save your results and then reboot to see the affect on your system. Here's some common padding settings.

• padding: 0 2px
• padding: 0 4px
• padding: 4 0px
• padding: 0 0px

If you want to make changes to the indicators in the System Tray and not the global menu, then enter the following information into the gtk.css file:

#fast-user-switch-menubar menuitem {
 padding-left:1px;
 padding-right:1px;
}

(You may have to tweak padding-left and padding-right values to get the results that you're looking for.)

Here's the results of the new settings affecting the icons in the System Tray.

You will notice that it didn't remove or reduce the padding of your Traditional Panel Menus.

I hope this helped you customize your Ubuntu MATE System Tray.

Take care!

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