The little exciting triangle

It seems that latest murrine engine switched from the lovely disclosure triangles for treeview and GtkExpander to old-school (and IMHO misleading) +/- button.

If you really want back triangles you could:

  • ask to creator/maintainer of your favorite murrine based GTK+ theme to apply the following snippet (you could start from here);
  • do it by your own, adding the same snippet to $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0 (and restart your session, as usual);
  • persuade Cimi that +/- is good for add/remove items and ▶ is good to display (or reveal) “information or functionality associated with the primary information in a window” (cit.) and mixing them is not so good 🙂

And now… the snippet!

style "expander-fix" = "default" {
engine "" {}
}

class "GtkExpander" style "expander-fix"
class "GtkTreeView" style "expander-fix"
class "GtkCTree" style "expander-fix"

PS Yes, disclosure triangles are really apple-ish, but when rationally used they seem really effective.

6 thoughts on “The little exciting triangle”

  1. We really need a coherent, standard GNOME design. What worked for interface design with the HIG can also work for visual design.

    Customisation should be just that, whereas the default look and feel should be worked on by every designer on the project and constantly improved.

  2. It seems hacker-artists took over the usability section of ubuntu. It’s not the only glaring…. ‘wtf?’ ;).

    From a history point considering the look of the originl ‘treeview’ (gtk clist) and the change _away_ from +/-… this is just amazing. It seems like the process for some of the decisions was:

    “We do a mockup on paper of N designs, and because it’s a mockup on paper we can evaluate the usability of it and select whatever we like. Also it must be different.”

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