Re: KDE and Gnome

[Marcin Antczak <marcin antczak e-dev pl>]

W liście z wto, 26-08-2003, godz. 18:52, Julien Olivier pisze: 
> On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 17:23, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 12:14, Julien Olivier wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 16:45, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > 
> > > > 
> > > > You have that ability.  Use a real mainstream tookit and not a cracked
> > > > out niche/custom one.  If you use a weird toolkit, you must not have
> > > > cared about conformity.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Well, if you use native themes (not bluecurve), GNOME and KDE have very
> > > different looks by default (GTK's default VS Keramik). So even
> > > mainstream toolkits can have clashing looks.
> > 
> > Redhat and Mandrake both solve this.  I'm sure SuSE will too, if they
> > haven't already.  Other distros may or may not care enough to use a
> > unified theme; if they don't, they are the wrong distro to use with
> > people who care about this stuff.
> > 
> 
> I'm not sure letting distributions fix problems is a good idea... but I
> agree that using a "fake" unified theme can be seen as a solution.

I agree with above - distributors are not for "hacking" themes and UI
elements.

But I think we should start - especially in gnome/gtk world from
documenting and puttind things in order.

Do you know any good documentation about creating gtk themes?
Is this really possible without programmistic skills?

Maybe we could start with good - I mean _really_ good theme engine for
example based on svg?

And then.... create some exporting tools?

Converting between good documented and standarized theme engine can be
easy.

For example converter between WindowBlins and Metacity themes is easy to
write and implement using easy tools as sh script + libxml + libxslt +
ImageMagick.

> 
> > > 
> > > More over, if someone uses GNOME and changes its theme, it just changes
> > > GTK theme. So, even if his GTK theme used to look like his QT theme, it
> > > won't be the case anymore after changing his GTK theme.
> > 
> > This is teeny bug, and doesn't need a massive toolkit purging or theme
> > redesign to fix... just write a little spec for picking theme name
> > (using XSETTINGS, perhaps) and the likely few lines of code needed for
> > it, and you're done.
> > 
> 
> No it's not a bug ! The problem is that there are about only 3 unified
> themes: Galaxy, Bluecurve and [K/G]eramik. That means that if you want
> to fix this "bug", you have to remove every other themes from the GTK
> and QT theme dialog and display only thise 3 themes. Then you can make a
> script that synchronizes GTK and QT themes.
> 
> Then, if you want to create a theme for Linux, you have to create a GTK1
> theme, a GTK2 theme and a QT3 theme instead of simply creating one
> theme.

Maybe you could create just good scheme concentrating on graphics (for
example in svg layout) and then export to any target format.

> > > > > app, you have 2 possibilities: whether you create an app with the
> > > > > standard look or you create a skinnable app (like XMMS). You don't have
> > > > 
> > > > XMMS is dying, thankfully.  The sooner, the better.  The UI is worst
> > > > monstrosity I've seen in a long time.  I still can't figure out how half
> > > > of it works.

Well maybe XMMS should die but Rhytmbox is a crap for now.

> > You are obsessing on such trivial pointless stuff.  Who cares about
> > default themes?  Who even _uses_ default themes?  Distros these days
> > don't give you the default theme by default, quit worrying about it.
> > 
> > And back to your theming library, what is it going to solve?  What?  You
> > can't unify anything except in the toolkit itself - the whole method
> > used to draw widgets varies between toolkits.  They vary based on
> > backend (X, Cairo, FB, etc.).  It's not feasible.
> > 
> 
> Of course it's feasible. All the library would return would be an array
> of pixels defined by theyr RGB value (a pixmap). Then eahc toolkit would
> draw it on its widget they way it wants.
> 

Well maybe a library could be a waste of time but a good software for
drawing themes could be very usefull.
I think that could be something like TopStyle Css editor for Windows it
contains informations about differences in Css implementations between
web browsers. The same could be in UI on Linux.


Marcin Antczak