Re: [gtk-list] Gtk look and feel

[Erik Mouw <J A K Mouw its tudelft nl>]

On Thu, 18 Nov 1999 13:17:36 +0400, leon@udmnet.ru wrote:
> There are words in GTK docs:
> "GTK is a library for creating graphical user interfaces similar to the 
> Motif "look and feel"". And it can really be observed that GTK has 
> inherited some Motif appearance. But, sadly, Motif is not an example

GTK inherited much of the Motif look and feel, but it just looks better
(IMHO). GTK was originally written to get rid of the Motif dependencies in
the Gimp, so that's the reason why it looks much like Motif.

> of aesthetically pleasant thing. To be sincere, Motif itself has some
> kind of aestheric integrity, so it's ugliness receives some kind of
> beauty through that consistency. But IMHO all attempts to accommodate
> Motif look in other toolkits yeilded bad results. GTK is not an 
> exception. It is the more miserable that GTK definitely has got it's
> own style which is broken by invasion of foreign Motif elements. The
> eyesore to looker's exacting eye are:
> 
> Concave border round the default button - it is a way too big. And
> maybe it can be drawn in different style?

I think you can set this in the gtkrc or otherwise make it a theme.

> "Triangular" buttons on the ends of scroll bars - they impose the
> feeling that they are hard to hit, because they are small, because
> they are triangular. Maybe there should be square buttons with 
> arrows drawn (painted) on them?

I agree that they are a bit too small, but again: make it a theme.

> Maybe scroll bars themselves should be made one - two pixels wider 
> by default?
> 
> When menu pops up (pulls down), the mouse pointer becomes leaned
> backwards. That is absolutely unnecessary, because this conveys 
> no info to user at all, since s/he understands very well that 
> it is a menu to choose from. But it looks crooked, really.

Unix users expect that behaviour, because it's exactly what every other
major toolkit does (Motif, OpenLook). It's just to be consistent.

> All that said, there can be asked a simple question: why take
> Motif as an example? There are *more* *perfect* GUI styles around,
> Mackintosh e.g.. Take after Makintosh!

Use the MacOS theme.

> If you can't change things that are already deeply rooted 
> (for "historical" reasons, I guess :) , you at least can make all
> these things themable, since some of them are not themable yet 
> AFAIK. 

Can you give an example of a non-themeable feature?


Erik

-- 
J.A.K. (Erik) Mouw, Information and Communication Theory Group, Department
of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems,
Delft University of Technology, PO BOX 5031,  2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands
Phone: +31-15-2785859  Fax: +31-15-2781843  Email J.A.K.Mouw@its.tudelft.nl
WWW: http://www-ict.its.tudelft.nl/~erik/