Linux · GNOME

Disabling the Bluetooth toggle in GNOME's Quick Settings

24 August 2026 · 4 min read

The Bluetooth icon in Ubuntu's top-right system menu turns Bluetooth off on a single click, with no confirmation. Here is the extension that disables that click while leaving the menu it opens untouched.

The problem

Ubuntu 24.04, GNOME Shell 46. The top-right system menu (GNOME calls it Quick Settings) has a Bluetooth button. It is two things stacked into one control:

  • A larger clickable area on the left that toggles Bluetooth on or off immediately, with no confirmation.
  • A small arrow on the right that opens the device/pairing submenu.

Clicking anywhere on the left side turns Bluetooth off. It is easy to hit by accident when you meant to open the device list, and there is no undo prompt. The goal was to disable that accidental-click behavior without touching the menu functionality.

The extension is on GitHub: patriciomase/gnome-bluetooth-toggle-guard.

Locating the control in GNOME Shell's source

GNOME Shell's Quick Settings toggles are defined in resource:///org/gnome/shell/ui/quickSettings.js. The Bluetooth entry is a BluetoothToggle, which extends QuickMenuToggle. A QuickMenuToggle is built from two sibling actors inside its _box:

  • An inner QuickToggle — the clickable body. Clicking it calls the underlying client's toggleActive().
  • _menuButton — the caret. Clicking it opens the popup menu.

These two are independent Clutter actors with independent event handling. That matters: it means the click behavior of the body can be intercepted without touching _menuButton, and without modifying GNOME Shell itself.

Approach

Patching GNOME Shell's own files is not a good target — it gets overwritten on every shell update. The alternative is a small local extension that, once the panel is built, finds the Bluetooth toggle's body actor and stops its click and touch events from propagating. Clutter.EVENT_STOP in a button-press-event or touch-event handler prevents the actor's own click behavior from firing, without removing the actor or disabling it visually.

The panel's Quick Settings toggles live in a grid, Main.panel.statusArea.quickSettings.menu._grid. The extension does two things on enable(): it walks that grid's existing children once, and it listens for child-added so a toggle rebuilt later (e.g. after a Bluetooth adapter is added/removed) still gets caught.

The extension

Two files, no build step, no dependencies.

metadata.json:

{
  "uuid": "bluetooth-toggle-guard@local",
  "name": "Bluetooth Toggle Guard",
  "description": "Disables the click-to-toggle main body of the built-in Bluetooth quick settings button (so it can't disconnect Bluetooth by accident) while leaving the arrow that opens the device/pairing menu fully working.",
  "shell-version": ["46"],
  "url": ""
}

extension.js:

import Clutter from 'gi://Clutter';
import { Extension } from 'resource:///org/gnome/shell/extensions/extension.js';
import * as Main from 'resource:///org/gnome/shell/ui/main.js';
import { QuickToggle, QuickMenuToggle } from 'resource:///org/gnome/shell/ui/quickSettings.js';

export default class BluetoothToggleGuardExtension extends Extension {
    enable() {
        this._grid = Main.panel.statusArea.quickSettings.menu._grid;
        this._handlers = new Map(); // contents actor -> signal ids

        this._childAddedId = this._grid.connect('child-added',
            (_grid, child) => this._maybeGuard(child));
        for (const child of this._grid.get_children())
            this._maybeGuard(child);
    }

    _maybeGuard(toggle) {
        if (!(toggle instanceof QuickMenuToggle) || toggle.constructor.name !== 'BluetoothToggle')
            return;

        const contents = toggle._box?.get_children().find(
            child => child !== toggle._menuButton && child instanceof QuickToggle);
        if (!contents || this._handlers.has(contents))
            return;

        const ids = [
            contents.connect('button-press-event', () => Clutter.EVENT_STOP),
            contents.connect('touch-event', () => Clutter.EVENT_STOP),
            contents.connect('destroy', () => this._handlers.delete(contents)),
        ];
        this._handlers.set(contents, ids);
    }

    disable() {
        this._grid.disconnect(this._childAddedId);
        this._childAddedId = null;

        for (const [contents, ids] of this._handlers) {
            if (contents.get_stage()) {
                for (const id of ids)
                    contents.disconnect(id);
            }
        }
        this._handlers = null;
        this._grid = null;
    }
}

_maybeGuard filters for QuickMenuToggle instances whose constructor name is BluetoothToggle — that excludes the other quick toggles (Wi-Fi, power profiles, night light, etc.), which are not menu toggles or are a different class. It then picks out the child of _box that is a QuickToggle and is not _menuButton — that is the clickable body. Handlers are tracked in a Map keyed by that actor so the same one is never wired twice, and removed from the map on destroy so a rebuilt toggle gets re-guarded rather than skipped.

disable() reverses everything explicitly: disconnects the child-added listener and every stored handler (guarding with get_stage() in case the actor was already destroyed), then drops the references.

Installing it

GNOME Shell extensions with no metadata in the official repository can be loaded from a local directory named after their UUID:

git clone https://github.com/patriciomase/gnome-bluetooth-toggle-guard.git
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/bluetooth-toggle-guard@local
cp gnome-bluetooth-toggle-guard/{extension.js,metadata.json} \
   ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/bluetooth-toggle-guard@local/

Then enable it:

gnome-extensions enable bluetooth-toggle-guard@local

On Wayland, a brand-new extension directory is only picked up by a fresh GNOME Shell process, so the first enable after creating the files needs a log out/log in (there is no "Restart Shell" action under Wayland the way there is under X11).

Verification

gnome-extensions info bluetooth-toggle-guard@local
bluetooth-toggle-guard@local
  Name: Bluetooth Toggle Guard
  Path: /home/pato/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/bluetooth-toggle-guard@local
  Enabled: Yes
  State: ACTIVE

With the extension active, clicking the body of the Bluetooth button in Quick Settings does nothing — Bluetooth stays in whatever state it was in. Clicking the small arrow still opens the device/pairing submenu as before, and Bluetooth can still be turned on or off from inside that submenu or from Settings → Bluetooth.

To remove the change: gnome-extensions disable bluetooth-toggle-guard@local, or delete the extension directory entirely.

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