Re: make metacity theme color editable

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

This may be a harder undertaking than you hoped ;-)
But I hope you'll work through it.

First, if you want to change the theme format it's in fact pretty hard;
we have to change what the theme file is named and add code to try the
new name and fall back to the old and have the parser complain if new
features are found in an old file. So if we do that we should really be
fixing a block of theme format issues at once, to make it worthwhile.
This bug tracks those issues as dependencies:
  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102547

Second, however, I'm unconvinced changing the theme format is the right
way to do this. Instead, you can simply write a gtkrc that changes the
gtk colors for metacity only, by only changing colors for the metacity
window frame widget. Read 
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk-Resource-Files.html
and then know that the metacity frames have a class, I think it would be
something like: class "MetaFrames" style "my-metacity-style"

Third, fitting into that, I would start with a broader-scope vision of
the UI: changing various desktop colors, not just window borders. If you
change the window border color using gtkrc, then other widget colors
will be changed in the same way. So the implementation is common, and I
would say it makes sense for the UI to be common as well.

I won't try to guess at what the right UI is, but perhaps a simple
answer is to add a Colors tab to the Theme Details dialog. It's possible
though that changing colors is a common enough user task that it should
be more obvious than that. One way to get ideas is to browse the colors
dialogs for Windows, Mac, KDE, etc.

Finally, you probably want to see what the control center maintainers
think about all this.

Havoc