Menu Shadows in GTK2

unmadindu noted that there is a now a gtk shadow patch which does what it says for GTK2 applications. You can see a screenshot, or another or yet another. And if you're lazy, here are some RPMs with the patch. One more piece of eye candy to brighten up your weekend.

Comments

Wow, must be a slow day

[brunes69]

GTK gets another feature that KDE has had for over a year. Wait itll they get window shadows in 2005. Will that also make the front page?

QT had shadows last year

[salimfadhley]

KDE had shadowed windows and menus a long time ago (at least it did on my distribution) - shouldnt the title of this article read

"GTK/Gnome finally catches up by implementing usless feature copied from OSX"

Yes, shadows are nice - they stop windows smelging into each other... but this is so NOT NEWS.

Re:QT had shadows last year

[mcgroarty]

"GTK/Gnome finally catches up by implementing usless feature copied from OSX"

Yes, shadows are nice - they stop windows smelging into each other... but this is so NOT NEWS.

Windows had it before the Mac, there was a hack to do it with Amiga Workbench before that, and it was in countless Hollywood computer displays before that, etc.

It's a slow news day, this does look kind of cool, and there are going to be people who enjoy it. Meanwhile, you spent an order of magnitude longer in complaining about the article than you would have in just skipping past, so -- what's your point?

Re:Hmmmm, might be bad.

[archen]

After 16 yours you should be taking a break anyway. The amount of eye strain you are probably experiencing is likely hurting your vision. I somehow doubt you look away from the screen every 15 minutes or so like your supposed to either (but who does that anyway? :) . I don't really see how this would make things that much harder to see than say, making an application look "3d" instead of strait black lines.

I think if there is any tragedy in Linux eyestrain it's anti-aliasing fonts, where I get the choice of: 1) looks like an ass (normal) 2) looks like a blurry mess (aliased).

Re:Bengali script

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical US'ian attitude. Apparently the predominant impression is that there are two languages is the world: English and "foreign". Foreign being a language that sounds just like english, but with an accent, and is written using random strokes.

Everybody should be able to tell arabic from bengali. However, telling the latter apart from devanagari is harder, and can be excused.

Great, another GTK appearance option (long).

[aussersterne]

Is there anywhere out there a configuration applet for GTK2? You know, something to configure the colors and fonts and manage odd things like drop shadows for menus without having to choose somebody else's idea of a nice desktop in a pre-built theme?

As a longtime KDE user, I'm used to just popping up the control center and configuring such things. KDE has always somehow taken care of the GTK applications' appearances as well. Some recent GTK2 applications, however (i.e. Ximan Evolution) began ignoring KDE's configuration. I got rather tired of seeing these sticking out like a sore thumb on my desktop and decided it was time to configure them to match my colors and fonts using a native GTK tool, instead of "cheating" by using KDE to configure my GTK applications.

Ummmm, where to start, that was the question.

I couldn't find anything but the theme selector in Red Hat 9's GNOME desktop. That let me choose other people's ideas of a nice desktop, but not my own. I tried the old "gnomecc" tool from the command line, but it wasn't there. Finally using an strace I figured out that the appearance of gtk was controlled in .gtkrc.mine and .gtkrc-2.0.mine. Great! Apparently this is how KDE controls the appearance of GTK applications -- it edits these files for me. But now some applications are not getting the hint properly. Okay, I'll edit the files by hand, no problem. I looked at the existing files... Not so great. Not intuitive.

Color format looks like the odd (0-1,0-1,0-1) tuple used by some GTK apps (notably The GIMP) in alternate color palette dialogs. I start up the GIMP and start trying to construct matching colors using that format, and then inserting them into .gtkrc-2.0.mine. After changing a few of the color options by trial and error, more gtk2 widgets do indeed match my KDE colors. Unfortunately, many do not, and the font still sucks.

Since there's nothing helpful in the .gtkrc and .gtkrc-2.0 files themselves, I start looking around for documentation. Back in the old days, X Resources for dotfiles were always documented in application manual pages. Maybe GTK apps do the same thing?

No dice.

So I get on to Google Groups and start looking. I find references to a file at gtk.org. Pretty soon I am digging through this little gem at developer.gnome.org, among others.

I couldn't believe that changing the appearance for a few GTK applications was orders of magnitude more complex and user-unfriendly than editing my old .Xdefaults or .XResources files had been. After another hour or so of studying, and some more trial-and-error, I was finally able to get my GTK2 applications to completely match my simple KDE colors and fonts -- which had taken me all of two minutes to select when I chose them way back in the KDE2 days and which I've been using ever since.

So... now we have GTK2 drop-shadows... Who the hell will ever figure out how to turn them on? Before we add yet more GTK2 appearance options, wouldn't it be prudent to get an application into GNOME to configure them all? Is there already one (other than KDE control center, which doesn't yet seem to completely work with GTK2) and I've just missed it?

In any case, for a while after Red Hat 9 came out I wondered if there was any real reason I was using KDE over GNOME... This episode gave me my answer!

Re:Great, another GTK appearance option (long).

[IamTheRealMike]

Somebody was working on a colour theme control applet for Gnome2, but I haven't heard anything about it for a while.

There isn't really great demand for it. If you want consistancy in your desktop, you're already using BlueCurve/Galaxy/Geramik etc, which do colours for you.

Setting GTKs colours, themes, fonts and so on should be done via XSETTINGS. Unfortunately the lack of a standardised colour format prevents this from happening currently, believe me, I'd like it too as then Wine and KDE could sync to *my* colours. But it's not done yet. Volunteers, as ever, are welcome.

A Drop Shadows Is a Great UI Cue

[EXTomar]

Drop Shadows are simply a great UI indication of "depth" and "boundry". I wish more UI primatives had it. Given a jumble of rectangles which one is the top most? So far the answer has been to highlight or focus the top one differently than the others (ie. title bar is a different color to stand out from the rest which may not work if your focus is different than your top most). Drop Shadows enhances this distinction since your brain has already been looking for the most contiguous rectange and assuming that is the top most. Sometimes that is hard to spot but things like Drop Shadows can help flag where windows end and at a glance show their stacking order.

Its great that UIs have Drop Shadows but I wonder why they aren't applied to even more primatives? Why don't entire windows have drop shadows?

Re:Save the eye candy

[93 Escort Wagon]

> I saw this and wondered, "what if the mouse pointer were the light source for GUI shadows
> hanging off menus and window frames; would it be horribly distracting or helpful for tracking the
> mouse pointer intuitively?"

E-17 had a demo that did exactly this. It looked really cool, and probably would be horribly distracting. I can imagine opening up a menu but then forgetting what you were planning to run because you'd get too caught up in playing with the dynamic shadow effect.

Of course we're talking E-17, so there's no danger of this actually happening in real life.