Empathy chat view has been supporting Adium themes for a long time now. Those themes are made of HTML, CSS and JS and are rendered using webkit-gtk. Empathy also supports build-in themes using a plain GtkTextView.
I’ve been working recently on improving empathy’s code to support the most recent theme spec as well as fixing rendering issues we had with some themes. I also added a theme preview is settings dialog.
Designers have been working hard to create the GNOME 3 look & feel, and I think a GNOME adium theme would be great to have for empathy chats. That theme would be shipped by empathy and set by default, so we could drop our GtkTextView-based themes for a massive code simplification.
This is a call for designers: We would like mockups, ideas, and finally a working adium theme to be used by empathy by default.
In a first step, gimped image of what we would like would be enough. Then we can start implementing it with the HTML/CSS.
Suggestions and ideas can be posted on the empathy bug #645920, or on the usability mailing list.
Nice supporting adiul theme for chat windows…
but the thing is that adium also support theme for contact window et THAT is really wanted 🙂 no othe client do this 🙂
nice work anyway !
the IRC chat window *really* could get some love as well, people in chatrooms don’t even have icons. Looks pretty ugly compared to pidgin.
The problem which such themes is that they don’t allow one to copy a conversation like it is possible with a basic text view.
@drago01: that has alsobeen why I never used any of those themes.
At first Iwould try them, like them, and the first time I wanted to copy-paste, there came the pain.
I’d love to have a nicer Empathy theme, but copy-paste really need to be properly supported.
What about making the theme look like the theme used in planet.gnome.org ?
Ditto for the copy+paste possibility.
Whatever you decide on, i dearly hope it’s one that can take its colors from the user’s current theme.
Empathy also supports build-in themes using a plain GtkTextView.
I thought we were removing old-style themes in 3.2. I suppose a new default is the first step towards that.
@Danielle: “That theme would be shipped by empathy and set by default, so we could drop our GtkTextView-based themes for a massive code simplification.” 🙂