Re: Re-inventing Metatheme

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 27Aug2002 12:24AM (-0400), Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Here is how I think "metathemes" should work.
> 
> We have gconf keys for:
> 
>  - gtk theme
>  - window manager theme
>  - desktop background
>  - icon theme
>  - etc.
> 
> If you download a "metatheme", it contains two things:
> 
>  - themes in one or more of the above categories
>  - gconf settings to set your gconf keys to point to the included
>    themes
> 
> There is no gconf key for "metatheme" because a metatheme isn't a
> setting, it's just a group of settings you can apply.
> 

This sounds inadequate from a usability perspective. The typical theme
user will only care about setting a matched set of themes, not
monkeying with them individually. Therefore it is important to be able
to answer questions like "what is my current theme" in the simple UI
that only gives a list of metathemes, so you have sane feedback when
you change it, and can go back and look later to tell your friend the
name so he can try it too, and so on.

I agree that there should be ways to customize specific things even if
you have a metatheme set, especially the desktop background, but I
don't think your proposal is the way to go. It may be simple to
implement but it will require exposing even the most casual user to
many separate concepts of theme.

In brief, write-only settings are bad.

 - Maciej