Category Archives: Themes

Future directions of Cowbell

November 4, 2009 – 10:50 am

Future directions. Here’s where Cowbell is going next:

The existing functionality is going to be moved into a library called libcowbell.  Very little will be changed at this point from what we already have.  (But there will be some extra tests.)
A release of the metacity-cowbell branch will be made that can use libcowbell.
A release of [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in CSS themes, Letters, Metacity Labs | Comments (2)

Future directions for Cowbell

October 30, 2009 – 7:56 pm

I believe the best direction in the immediate future for Cowbell is as follows:

Fix the :hover and :active pseudoclasses.
Add support for v2 themes back in.
Provide a patch for Mutter.
Port some more themes, such as Crux.

Anyone wishing to advocate for anything else on the future directions list to come sooner is welcome to make their point, [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in CSS themes | Comments (2)

The Sunshine theme

October 29, 2009 – 11:52 pm

In order to demonstrate Cowbell more adequately, I asked Firinel to help design a new and simple theme. The result was Sunshine.
In order to test Cowbell, you will need to download Sunshine.  Then follow the instructions in the README to unpack it into your ~/.themes directory.  The tarball also includes a copy of Crux, [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Comments (1)

CSS on window borders experimental layout language

October 29, 2009 – 8:31 pm

I’m happy to announce the first experimental version of Metacity with support for CSS window borders (”Cowbell”).  This work was largely supported by Collabora Ltd.
You can:

download the tarball;
read the documentation (it’s not as boring as you might imagine);
review the source history.

This diagram should explain everything, perhaps.
I would especially like to hear from:

theme artists, to let [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in CSS themes | Comments (6)

Now with more cowbell

October 21, 2009 – 3:54 pm

I posted a while ago about a system to represent window border styles in CSS. Well, once we had a workable system sorted out, it was time to add the support to a window manager. So I’ve recently been working on adding CSS support to Metacity. The most fiddly part so far [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in CSS themes | Comments (0)

Apologia for CSS

July 20, 2009 – 7:05 pm

This blog is not about to become devoted to the single topic of experimental CSS theming, but some interesting points were raised in the discussion yesterday, which spilled over to Slashdot.  We should have emphasised the experimental nature of the CSS subsystem in its name: perhaps “CSS On Window Borders Experimental Layout Language”.
Why? Some people [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in CSS themes, Letters, Metacity Labs | Comments (4)

More CSS thoughts

July 18, 2009 – 11:17 pm

The recent discussion about CSS themes looks as though it may become one of the most interesting new ideas in theming in recent years. Here are some further thoughts on what may evolve from this.
An alternative. There is no general way, and few special ways, to convert expression-based v1 and v2 themes to the [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in CSS themes, Thought experiments | Comments (14)

The wider world of window border themes

July 16, 2009 – 5:26 pm

After all this talk about theme formats, an overview of how they are handled in other window managers seemed in order. Your chronicler is no expert on most of these systems, so there may well be mistakes below.

As you probably know, Metacity uses a complex and powerful (perhaps over-powerful) XML-based vector theme format.
Matchbox uses [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in overview | Comments (7)

Copper: an experiment with CSS

July 15, 2009 – 1:08 am

Further to our previous discussion of CSS, Thomas spent a few hours on sketching out a possible design for a CSS-based theme format, and on representing Daniel Borgmann’s Human theme using it. This is an experiment, all very blue-sky and unofficial, and is quite likely never to lead anywhere.
The first question to resolve is [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in CSS themes, Metacity Labs, nargery | Comments (11)

Towards a third version of the theme format: some design goals

July 13, 2009 – 5:36 pm

When we add features to the theme format, they must be added all in one go for reasons which were explained earlier. We are currently on version 2 of the theme format. In case there is ever a version 3, here are some of our design goals.  Not all of these may necessarily [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in Themes v3, Thought experiments | Comments (2)

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