On 06/17/2014 10:56 AM, Marco Martin wrote:
On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 3:09 PM, Marco Martin <notm...@gmail.com <mailto:notm...@gmail.com>> wrote:

    On Thursday 15 May 2014 11:39:00 Jens Reuterberg wrote:
    > Ok so after the feedback from the Beta Release an issue that we
    knew was
    > coming have happened. Visuals being the most easily accessible
    bit of
    > anything technical, people have reacted negatively to the lack
    of change.

    just to give a shot on every and single options, i gave a try to
    modifying
    oxygen in order to make it look like breeze (therefore sharing all
    the things
    that it does that are not related to painting, like drag the
    window from
    anywhere)
    this is the half done, half missing attempt (ignore the non
    changed elements)
    http://wstaw.org/m/2014/05/29/plasma-desktophP1414.png

    is pretty hacky, but *maybe* is possible to have in the end only a
    different
    stylehelper (and pixelmetrics/stylehints)
    so could be something worth exploring in the future

Adding Hugo with a very due explanation of what it is:
The Visual Design Group came up with an idea for a new design for a widget style in KDE. But of course a Qt widget style is an huge undertaking that will take a lot to do. Now, Oxygen is the sum of years of experience and fixes, (and also does a ton of things to make application behave well that are beside just "painting", not to mention the companion themes that integrate nicely gtk 2 and 3 apps) and would really be a shame to lose all those years of development and experience, so I was wondering how hard would be to adapt the Oxygen codebase to a new visual style (would be a new style, or perhaps hopefully something sharing a lot of code)

in the link above, there is a screenshot of an attemptIi made to quick and dirty try to adapt some of the elements (is incomplete and only partial, but promising, seems that changing rounded radiuses and removing some gradients here and there gets pretty close)

Hugo, do you think it would be a feasible thing? And would you be interested in it? (I was thinking about something like maintaining most of the style, and set apart an oxygenhelper(as is now) vs breezehelper for the different visual related things)

Cheers,
Marco Martin

Hi Marco, others,

Sorry for the delayed answer.

First off, I unfortunately have very little time left since about half a year to dedicate to KDE/Oxygen aside from bug fixing and it is likely not going to improve. So that I would not be a reliable choice for undertaking the development of a Breeze Qt4/Qt5/Gtk2/Gtk3 widget theme. (though I could give an occasional hand to anyone volunteering).

As for starting from Oxygen's code base, I think it is a good idea indeed. Large amount of code could likely be reused quite unchanged: animations, window grabbing, fancy splitters. They could even be moved to a library, that Breeze would load. (ok there is versionning, API freeze etc. involved, but no serious core development)

As for the styling, indeed rewriting the helper class is a possible start. Also, current oxygen has basically one method for every primitive/control/etc. So it should also be easy to just inherit from it, and just re-implement these methods one after the other ...

Still, that would not bring you Gtk2 and Gtk3, which is quite a serious issue.

For such things, QtCurve is indeed a good candidate, since as far as I know it is the only widget theme around that implements all major flavors of toolkits ... but has an issue of "over-configuraribility" by design, which is not so good for branding, imho.

Last but not least, you could try "hire" the latest QtCurve dev for KDE (Yichao Yu <yyc1...@gmail.com>) , to work on a cut-down and cleaned-up version of QtCurve, called Breeze. The guy is good, nice, very active and knows all of both Qt and Gtk. He has help debugging/fixing oxygen and qtcurve simultaneously quite a number of times already.

QtCurve already use (copy) part of oxygen's code (and vice versa), so here also I could contribute, without taking maintainership.

... and finaly, there is window decoration. I guess one could start with an aurorae theme (although not optimal, since you ultimately need some extra features, such as synching with the widget theme, for background gradient for instance).

Hugo


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