Comments on: Justifying window titles

By: ᛏᚦ » Blog Archive » Thomas Thurman does not like cold meals because of broken applications

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:05:16 +0000

[...] be an obvious disproportionality. Something that struck me today was Mårten Woxberg mentioning the proliferation of Metacity themes; I think we see so many of them because they’re something relatively harmless and easy for [...]

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:00:08 +0000

Mårten:
It’s funny though– if a person looked at, say, Crux and decided they wanted it red, and they made it red, they could either have done so by going through some rather complicated set of reconfigurations, in which case they couldn’t easily share it with their friends, or they could have made it so that they made a theme file, in which case they could just give their friends the theme file.

So I think what we have here, with the proliferation of versions, is a better example of the advantages of free software than most actual software. Users understand that they can modify themes even if they’re afraid of digging into code– so they do, and they share it. And nobody has to do patch review or anything, so everyone’s happy. ;)

By: Mårten Woxberg

Mårten Woxberg — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:55:06 +0000

I haven’t even thought of it as a problem, since I use the default setting of any theme.
But It seems like there are ALOT of theme’s that are forks of popular themes that really could have been just color corrections or options in the main theme.

Though this isn’t a Metacity problem.

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:41:20 +0000

Are you saying that justification should not be a theme matter at all? In that case theme authors would lose the ability to place and style the title where they pleased.

Or are you saying that justification should be a theme matter, but the window manager could be made to ignore it? But you could say that about everything else involved in a theme too.

Of course a script could be trivially written in userspace which performs the work above and allowed you to have a left/centre/etc justify button. I like keeping things out of the window manager where possible.

By: Mårten Woxberg

Mårten Woxberg — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:18:32 +0000

This is great and all, but we have a zillion different configurations of themes. Wouldn’t it be easier just to have ha button to left/center/whatever justify?