Re: Window managers

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

>What I would like to see is a standard for "integrated" theme definition.
>I.e., if I define a style for tool tip, I should only have to define it in
>one rc file, after which it should look the same for both GNOME and whatever
>WM I'm using.

 This is easy to accomplish if the WM either uses GTK widgets to draw its 
window frames and menus, or parses the gtkrc file to find out what GTK theme 
is being used and uses that information when drawing its window frames and 
menus. The standard (GTK themes) is already there, WMs just need to start
using it.

>Granted, there may be some things that would apply only to GNOME or only to
>the WM, but there is also enough overlap that someone should promulgate a
>standard for specifying everything in a single file with a homogenous
>syntax.  Then downloading, installing, and selecting a theme would be a
>one-shot operation.

 I suggest using gtkrc, but adding a couple of Gnome-specific clauses to 
define settings for WM titlebars. This is because I think the WM titlebars 
should look consistent with the GTK theme but should still obviously be 
titlebars, ie they would probably have a larger font and a different 
background to menubars. Any window managers which wanted to use this 
information could use it, and any WMs or GTK apps which didn't need it would 
ignore it. Existing themes could be adapted very easily.

>Such a standard could be specified as part of the definition of "GNOME aware"
>and/or "GNOME compliant".  (WMs that had not converted to use the new
>standard might still work OK, but would not be "fully compliant".)

 The Gnome compliance standard was written by Rasterman, so it's unlikely to
include anything which would limit E's capabilities or which would mark E as
"not fully compliant". Enlightenment has support for nonrectangular window 
frames and TrueType fonts, so GTK compatibility would seriously limit the
range of E themes available. If WM theme information is made available in 
gtkrc, WM authors can choose whether or not they want to be restricted by the
capabilities of GTK themes. I suspect Rasterman would not want to tie E to the
GTK themes standard.

 Of course, Rasterman is working on GTK themes as well, so maybe he will 
decide to incorporate TrueType font support and shaped window widgets into
the next gtk-engines... that would be very, very cool.



 - Michael Rogers