Re: toolbar issues

[David Emory Watson <dwatson cs ucr edu>]

On Tue, 2002-05-21 at 10:36, Dave Bordoley wrote:
> Gtk provides toolbar theming, gtk themes should theme stock icons, gnome
> apps should use gtk => nautilus should use gtk.

I don't buy that.  Maybe we are just misunderstanding each other.

I think that nautilus should use the gtk mechanism (but not if it means
that I'm stuck with the current stock icons)

> Think of it this way, theme writers start writing killers gtk themes
> with toolbar icons that are rad unfortunately you don't ever see those
> icons, since your current nautilus theme overides them always.

Yeah, I suppose it could happen.  It's doesn't sound very likely to me
though.  One of the advantages of the theme-able nautilus icons is that
there are only 6 of them.

I actually think the back, forward, stop, ..., icons are in a class by
themselves since the main applications which use them are nautilus and
galeon.  While it is important to me that nautilus looks cool, I frankly
don't care if gnumeric looks cool.  Why?  Because those apps have
entirely different purposes.  In fact, I like gnumeric to look
professional rather than cool.

> Theme writers should theme toolbars at the gtk level ( i would love to
> see gorilla gtk theme, probably would be rad). Fixing this, will force
> both nautilus and gtk theme writers to write better themes anyway. 

I agree that the gtk mechanism should be used, but to what effect...

I currently think the best solution is for tigert and jimmac to use the
gtk mechanism for overriding icons and the nautilus mechanism for
everything else.  Then install both themes with the same rpm.

And no that should not mean that they have to redo every stock icon! 
They should only need to change the way that the current nautilus icons
are themed.

> I really don't understand what is so special about nautilus that it
> should even have it's own theming mechanism, but that's another
> discussion.

There are parts of nautilus which require a special theming mechanism
(sidebar backgrounds, icon view background, etc.)

Oh and nautilus is *very* special!  :)

> dave
> 
> On Tue, 2002-05-21 at 10:01, David Emory Watson wrote:
> > The problem is not that the nautilus toolbar contains custom icons but
> > rather that those icons do not override the system defaults (at the very
> > least this should be the case inside of nautilus, e.g. when I use the
> > Gorilla theme the Go menu should show Gorilla icons).
> > 
> > If we think that it would be preferable to have all custom icons set in
> > a single place (i.e. not set in the nautilus xml theme file, but
> > installed in a separate theme file instead) then we might be able to
> > talk the theme designers (i.e. tigert and jimmac) into changing their
> > themes to use the gtk method.  Then nautilus toolbar icons would
> > override gtk icons when installed.  
> > 
> > The only potential problem I can see with this is that the theme
> > designers might not want to their custom icons to apply to everything,
> > in which case either gtk must have a way to specify this or nautilus
> > will need to handle the job.  I dunno.  Tigert and Jimmac, would either
> > of you object if your toolbar icons were installed system wide?
> > 
> > Would any users object?
>