Themes on GnuStep?

[Robert E. Hartley]

Hello,

I would like to be able to use GnuStep on PDAs, but thought that since I
will be monekying around with the internals to make sure it fits, I
thought maybe I should ask what sort of themeing capabilites are
available for setting appearances on the different widgets?

I recently finished off a project for theme capabilites on Motif which
may be getting merged into the standard code base.

Before I get flamed for trying to also turn GnuStep into bloatware, I
found I was able to keep the Motif source code mostly intact except for
occasional places where I checked to see if themeing was turned on, and
then made calls to the theme engine, which was in a separately shared
library.

This way the "bloatacious" ("bloatafacient"?) effects of heaping even
more layers onto the API were reduced, and in theory, if a reduced
footprint was required, it might actually be much smaller to use a
theme'd only version of it without the standard Xlib calls to draw lines
and polygons.

Part of the reason I think this may be useful is that there is likely to
be a mix of applications on a Linux PDA, so the unit may not be a
purebread Gnustep box.

If it ws possible to make use of Gtk+ type themes on GnuStep, it would
make it easier to have a more homgeneous appearance between the apps,
and in theory a PDA sized version of GnuStep could be created that would
have the appropriate parts carefully "#ifdef"'ed out of the way, both to
avoid theme'ed versions of the code (for those that consider sort of
thing offensive), or conversely, to enable a smaller, theme'd only
version.

The possible downside of this might be the ensuing clutter of trying to
read past the #ifdef ... #else ... #endif code blocks and the added
convolution of program flow.  From what I experienced doing this sort of
thing for Motif, adding themes was a very light touch affair that was
hardly noticeable afterwards.

Of course, themeing is turned off by default, so that code builds fbit
or bit and byte for byte the same as the standard base kept in the
pre-theme state.

Since I am a complete newbie to this GnuStep stuff, I welcome your
laughter/flames and of course constructive criticism,

Happy hacking,

Rob

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
=  Robert Hartley                 Mail:         201 Broadway        =
=  Central Region Systems Engineer              Cambridge, MA 02139 =
=  Integrated Computer            Email:        address@hidden    =
=  Solutions, Inc.                Web Site:     www.ics.com         =
=  Tech Support: address@hidden  Phone:        800-800-4271        =
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Visit the MotifZone (www.motifzone.org) for info on Motif!