Re: [Gimp-gui] GIMP Theme UI now and future.

[Ben <draekko software gmail com>]

On 01/01/2016 01:53 PM, Elle Stone wrote:
> On 01/01/2016 12:14 PM, Ben wrote:
> > Elle, Jehan, i've updated the themes to add the separators, fixed some
> > more KDE issues, reduced the focus padding on buttons as an expedient to
> > making the them smaller without having to redo anything (and changed
> > some of the pngs to harmonize all the themes), commented out the font
> > settings so people can choose as they wish to have or not, added version
> > numbers to the files so i can keep track of what people are using,
> > started a repo so i can track changes locally available here
> > https://github.com/Draekko-RAND/gimp-themes (which is where i'll keep
> > the screenshots from now on).
>
> Ben, thank you! I tried modifying just the colors for some of the
> items in the "Lighter side of GIMP" theme. It's not as easy as I
> thought it would be!
Welcome, i know took me weeks to figure out even the basics :) 
especially considering a lot of information is outdated and lots of 
links to tutorials are dead. If it wasn't for a few good themes to peek 
at and see how it was done, i'd probably still be trying to figure it out.

> I've been using the (original) "Lighter side" theme and find that in
> use I actually like the wider icon spacing for the monotone icons. For
> color icons, the closer spacing is compensated for by the color
> differentiation, but not so much for the monotone icons. And at least
> to me the wider spacing for the monotone icons seems more attractive
> to look at.
Yeah sadly if i increase that it affects everything because gimp uses 
buttons for a lot of things (combobox, list headers, etc...) so you need 
to decide if you want to sacrifice screen real-estate to that or not. 
You can't have it both ways, not with the way the UI is hardcoded right 
now & with how theming works for gtk2 its no fun at all.

> The new separators are very helpful. Even though I know where the
> toolbox dividers are, without the separators often it was difficult to
> find the place to resize the panels (something I do fairly often,
> depending on what I'm working on).
I never did, but glad you find them useful, i personally hate them and 
how they look in gtk but thats my thing ;)

> Your themes make GIMP look very nice, very professional. It seems to
> me that the monotone icons are a pretty important part of that look.
> For this same reason personally I'd prefer that sliders in the
> monotone themese also be monontone - it just plain looks nice, and
> aesthetics do count.

Thanks, and yes those icons make a difference.

> I'm not sure how many themes and how many sets of icons are "too
> many". But given the following:
>
> * many differently-sized devices are used for editing images
> * the wide disparity in user personal preferences
> * issues with eyesight and/or hand-eye coordination that might lead a
> user to prefer the wider icon spacing and/or color icons
5 is my limit since i have to maintain them and test them on all variant 
OSes :) Its hard to make it work across everything and time consuming to 
keep it up. So far i've tested them on OSX (Maverick only so far), 
Windows (8.1 so far), Linux (KDE, Unity, Wine under Unity) to make sure 
they felt the same across the board. There's only so much that can be 
tweaked to keep that true.

> it might be nice to include two sizes for icons - the original size
> and the smaller size, and also keep the original color icons in both
> sizes.
I think there are plans to switch eventually to svg icons which would 
render the point moot.

Ben