Themes and default fonts....

[jg pa dec com (Jim Gettys)]

I've been wandering through the 1.9C spec recently: I hope to post
detailed comments next week.

What I did not see, however, disturbs me:

Both Gnome and KDE have facilities for "themes" and default font selection, 
and dynamically changing these in running applications (I applaud the 
improvement over Xt!!!)

However, the reality of the situation is that I (and most people) use
applications from at least 4 environments:
	1) the "legacy" environment of Motif/CDE/Xt toolkits
	2) Gnome
	3) KDE
	4) your window manager of choice.

Now, I think we all agree we're jointly well on the way to making 1) go
away, though I also suspect that alot of applications that get ported
from UNIX to Linux over the next year or two may be based on Motif/CDE
and/or Xt.

This is still leaving an end user with a "mess".

In order to get the applications set up with the look and fonts I want,
I get to go play with:
	1) control panel from KDE
	2) control panel from Gnome
	3) whatever control panel the window manager has.

And Enlightement and Gnome, which I happen to use as my default environment 
(maybe I should switch monthly, so no one thinks I'm taking sides here; 
I certainly have both installed on my machines), it seems strange to have 
to mess with both independently to change theme and/or fonts.

This "sucks big time", to use the vernacular.


I think a proper goal is to enable gnome and KDE apps to be used
in either environment interchangably (we're stronger together than
divided), and we can do better than this:

So, I strongly believe there should be:
	1) some way to notify apps what theme has been selected by the
user (under whatever control panel (s)he likes.  I bet, once the mechanism
gets built, that there will be some attempt to make at least some subset
of the space of all possible themes roughly similar between the toolkits
in use.  This can be done in a very simple way: you can leave it
to the toolkits to do as best they can to match themes (and have a simple
substitution table, saying, for example, if the user wants "gnome blue ice",
I'll use "kde ice blue" or some such.  I think a very simple protocol
is in order here.
	2) similarly, some way to set the fonts to be used by the window
manager and/or toolkits between toolkits.
In the past, this level of customization was done by the Xrm facilities:
this continues to be a viable option as far as I'm concerned.  I know
that some of you don't like the Xrm stuff, (in large part, I think because
it got "overused" in Xt days as the only mechanism for customization)
and other solutions are possible.  My personal recommendation is to
use the Xrm facilities by defining particular resources, using
it in the more constrained way I, at least, thought it was going to
be used along time ago, rather than the overuse that it seems to have done.


	It does have one virtue you need to think about: X is network
transparent, and when I run an application remotely, it doesn't
necessarily have access to your home directory.  I believe application
servers are again going to be very important in the "new world" being built,
so I personally don't like solutions that don't work when I run remote
apps without access to my file store.

I did not see anything in the window manager spec to deal with these
issues.

Am I missing something?  Should I retreat to my cave now?

So my goal here is simple: make the end user's life much simpler in
this brave new world you all are building...
				- Jim Gettys



--
Jim Gettys
Technology and Corporate Development
Compaq Computer Corporation
jg@pa.dec.com