Darkilouche 0.2.2

Feb 26 2007

With some help from the nice folks at #gnome-art, I’ve updated my dark gtk theme, Darkilouche, to use symbolic colors. The theme appears to look very similar to my previous effort, but symbolic colors make gtkrc much more bearable to live with. It became a lot more readable - shade (0.6, @selected_bg_color) will tell you a lot more than #ff7423. And for the user it’s absolutely lovely to be able to define a basic set of six colors and have the theme shade appropriately. I love that about metacity themes.

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Local Gtk Themes

Since I brought up metacity, I’d like to throw a bone if some art-inclined hacker feels compelled to pick up.

Observing stars is better in the rural areas and not in a light-polluted city. Similarly Darkilouche is sweet for artwork/photo editing apps. It brings up the actual content, not the background/widgets. That’s also the only thing I don’t like about flickr, photos tend to get lost in the shining white surroundings.

Majority of web pages use a white background, and editing documents on light grey feels unnatural to many people. So a dark theme doesn’t work so well for those applications. Gtk+ allows to launch an application with custom gtkrc file. To launch F-Spot with Darkilouche:

GTK2_RC_FILES=$HOME/.themes/Darkilouche/gtk-2.0/gtkrc f-spot

But there is something that bothers me about using Darkilouche for GIMP, Inkscape and F-Spot only. Good metacity themes don’t hardcode colors, but make use of the colors defined in the Gtk theme. Metacity currently doesn’t consider local themes, so the window border is usually a lot lighter for the ‘dark apps’ and creates an unnatural frame.

I have a dejavu feeling about it, but I’ve filed a new enhancement bug for this on metacity.

Maybe a workaround in making Devil’s Pie forcing a theme with hardcoded colors for the specific app windows would be a more feasable approach?