How to change themes (was Re: How do we change fonts now)

[Matthias Clasen]

On Sat, 2011-02-19 at 12:20 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Am Freitag, den 18.02.2011, 14:36 -0500 schrieb Matthias Clasen:

> Thanks a lot, Matthias.
> 
> Setting the theme to Adwaita did the trick. Both GTK+ 2 and 3 are more
> consistent now and use the same color palette.
> 
> However I noticed that the GTK+ 2 theme looks very different from the
> GTK+ 3 version, e.g. the menus have rounded corners while they should
> have sharp edges. Overall it looks very similar to Clearlooks.

Well, the GTK2 Adwaita theme is using the Clearlooks engine, so its not
a huge surprise...

> What can we do to get a more consistent look in Fedora 15? As I doubt we
> will be able to port everything to GTK+ 3 we need to provide a better
> match and more  matching themes. What would be the best starting point
> to bring Adwaita to GTK+ 2 or Clearlooks to GTk+ 3?

To bring Clearlooks to GTK3, take the gtk-theme-engine-clearlooks
package as a starting point; the engine should almost work with GTK3
(not sure if it has been kept uptodate in the last round of GTK+ api
changes, after we got Adwaita); and the Clearlooks theme needs to be
ported to the GTK3 css syntax.

To bring Adwaita to GTK2, take the changes in
gtk-theme-engine-clearlooks and backport them to the GTK2 Clearlooks
engine in gtk2-engines; then update the GTK2 Adwaita theme in
gnome-themes-standard to get as close to the GTK3 version as is
feasible.

I don't see anybody on the GNOME side having time to take this one
before GNOME 3, really. What little resources we have will have to go
into a11y and dark variants of Adwaita.