Previously from Scott Scriven...
>Here are a few differences, off the top of my head:
>
> - You can have a system-wide configuration which can be
> overridden or modified by users' individual configurations.
I think this is really important, too.
> - It separates "look" from "feel" by putting input bindings in
> their own file.
>
> - You can switch themes from a menu, without restarting fvwm.
This is nice. Basically, themes ought to be set-able with a:
Read theme/theme
or something like that. That means that decors, etc. of the existing
theme should be destroyed before reading, and that, to be safe, before
creating any new structures, a well-behaved theme should destroy
itself. Fortunately, Dominik's working on Style so that they apply
immediately without issuing Recapture... Hope it's ready for 2.4.
Would make theming a lot easier. Otherwise all themes should conclude
with a Recapture.
Really, most of this junk can be automated by designing some built-in
functions that all themes load, like "_DestroyThisTheme" and
"_ReadNewTheme".
> - Themes can be randomly selected upon startup.
>
> - Themes do not include wallpaper, but it should be easy to
> incorporate them using the "bkgd" script on my page. (for
> example, set a random "green" background with a green theme)
FvwmBacker seems to be perfectly alright for this purpose. It relies
on an external program like xv(1) or display(1) for setting background
images. On the upside, it's desk-aware (soon to be page-aware), and
FvwmTheme/Colorset compatible.
> - 12 themes are included; more will come as people make them.
> Two of these were from fvwm.themes.org, the rest are mine.
>
>One problem: It currently requires windows to have 4 title
>buttons, a menu on the left and minimize-maximize-close on the
>right. This gives a consistent feel, but restricts visual
>freedom for theme designers.
I remember this one being troublesome to me too. On the one hand,
window buttons are, without doubt, behavior-related, but they also are
an important part of the GUI look. It'd be silly if you have a classic
MWM button layout (0 for menu, 1 for maximize, 3 for minimize) and you
loaded a Win95-style button theme... the buttons would look like they
did things other than what they did, unless you rebound the actions...
bad news, IMHO. Perhaps there's a way to preprocess so that the theme
Does The Right Thing WRT the buttons the user has chosen to bind. I'm
not even sure if that's possible, but it certainly seems the most
desirable thing to do. (In case it's not clear what I mean by "Does
The Right Thing", I mean that the theme should provide a set of
buttons for: menu, min, max, close. It should add buttons where they
belong.)
Any comments, further ideas, etc.?
--
mikehan_at_best.com http://www.best.com/~mikehan/
coffee achiever San Francisco, California
"What was your username?" - BOFH
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Received on Thu Nov 11 1999 - 12:14:15 GMT