Widget themes

When it comes to looks, window managers only care about the windows themselves, i.e. the borders and buttons. If you want the insides of the windows (buttons, scrollbars, text, menus and so on) to look a certain way you have to take it up with the widget toolkit used by that particular application.

True, an application can use any of the available toolkits, and there is no shortage of them. The look and feel of that application will change with the toolkit. Among the toolkits the most widely used right now are probably GTK+ v1, GTK+ v2 (used by Gnome) and QT (used by KDE).

So, the themes...

TrueBlue 1.0

First things first: this theme uses no less than 6 different theme engines: xeno, pixmap, flat, thinice, raleigh and redmond95. Sorry about that :/ You can find all of these engines on the Freshmeat website. You will have to compile and install them, if you don't already have them.

TrueBlue is my first attempt at making (hacking would be a better suited term) a GTK+1 theme. I didn't like any of the existing Windows XP look-alikes because I thought the original Luna interface is a bit too loaded with un-necessary eye-candy. Therefore, my theme is a "toned-down" replica which tries to emulate the feel of Luna but keeps bells and whistles to a minimum.

Having no previous experience in the field, I decided to gather some of the best themes which attempted to imitate the Luna interface and hacked them together: WhistlerK, Gates of Hell, Watercolor (also see the AUTHORS file in the package).

I have been asked: why go to the trouble to rip-off Windows (or any other OS for that matter) interfaces? I have my reasons: to see if I can do it (it sure was a challenge, especially with my lack of experience); the Luna interface is beautiful; to lure unsuspecting computer-illiterate lusers into using Linux (a nice interface helps).