[Design-team] Fwd: Gnome shell theming plus extension!

[Jef van Schendel]

2010/8/4 Emily Dirsh <emily at fightingcrane.com>:
> Thanks Jef! I haven't contacted anyone else about it. Although I would
> love to share it with the gnome-shell team (probably the design team).
> Liam and I just threw it together last night, and it's pretty rough
> right now, so I thought I'd share it here and see if I could get it
> tested a bit more. ;) (Honestly, I could see it as the basis of a theme
> switcher/selector extension, but that's too ambitious for me atm :))
>
> I've had trouble building gnome-shell lately as well. Have you tried
> installing the gnome-shell package? I found out last night that there is
> a package for it in the repos. I'm not sure how recent it is, but it
> should be fine for theme testing.

The last time I tried was a long while back... I think I used the
package from the repos. I'm on Ubuntu right now, so I hope the
packages in the nightly PPA will work soon.

But you're right, an older version will probably be fine for theming.
I'll try that next and let you know how it goes!

> When I get a chance, I'll definitely get in touch with the gnome-shell
> team, because I also think we should help with documenting the
> gnome-shell theming process. We really need documentation on available
> selectors, and what parts of the shell they correspond with; as well as
> the non-standard css styles the shell supports. You can figure a good
> bit of it out between the included css file and plain trial and error,
> but let's only have to do that once ;)

Definitely. Most themes I've seen use a single color for half of the
shell and gradients for the other half. I thought that was the extent
of theming possibilities, but then I saw this:

http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/214/3/7/GNOME_Shell___Ambiance_Theme_by_half_left.png

Regardless of whether it looks good or not, it fits really really well
with Ubuntu's theme and proves that there are more possibilities. I
think that's really good news for us. :)

Jef