Re: themes....

[raster redhat com]

On  1 Feb, James Taylor shouted:
->  
->  Such a tool would be a seperate application and should not neccesarily be
->  part of the themability in GNOME. Although configuration files should be
->  designed to make it as easy as possible to have a program modify them as
->  well as parse them. 
->  
->  I think that such an application has been planned all along for
->  Enlightenment, and consequently for GTK themes... But it cannot be written
->  until the theme system has been fully implemented. A trap we should avoid
->  is going with a graphical config system exclusively, since that would
->  exclude things such as a perl based theme interpreter. To remain powerfull
->  the theme system must allow the author to do more complicated things than
->  just specifying a pixmap background.

Actually.. interesting.. Enlightement is moving to use perl to parse
config (ie theme) files - so you just nee to write a new pwrl parser
and you can change the config format - using perl to do this is really
easy - because perl was designed to parse and output text.

But you are right. It will need to be an evolving format whihc most
probably won't have a graphical frontend for a while - due to this. You
would need to change the config editor repeatedly whnever changes are
made/added. The editor shoudl be written after themse have been
finalised and settled.

->  But how to reconcile the two? If theme files allow inline scripting and
->  other more complex tools how would a graphical config tool handle those?

Currently the way gtk works, the most we can really do is set certain
attributes per widget (see http://www.labs.redhat.com/themes.shtml) -
then for other widgets later 9stage 2) eg scrolled windows, lists
scrollbars etc. - also be able to specify scroller arrow positioning
and posibly more (scrollbars on left/bottom, right/top etc.) I yet
again sugest anyone who has an amiga or access to one to download MUI
(http://www.sasg.com/) and play with it - it will give you a good idea
what a widget set 5 years ago thathas beco9me a sandard on amigas can
do - and it does that in 7Mhz 68000's.

->  > no matter how u implement themes in GNOME,  please have some way to
->  > graphically change the settings and preview them, rather than editing an
->  > rc file and then having to restart.
->  
->  

-- 
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