On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 01:25, Christopher Roy Bratusek <[email protected]> wrote: > Am 14.06.2011 07:59, schrieb Eric P. Mangold: >> >> On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 00:22, Christopher Roy Bratusek >> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> Am 14.06.2011 06:06, schrieb Eric P. Mangold: >>>> >>>> Sounds mostly good... >>>> >>>> On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 14:44, Christopher Roy Bratusek >>>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> [...] >>>>> At the end... the list of themes shipped with Sawfish: >>>>> >>>>> absolute-e >>>>> candido >>>>> Crux >>>>> Elberg-tabbed >>>>> microGUI >>>>> mxflat >>>>> StyleTab [default] >>>>> Zami-like >>>>> (gradient-tabbed) >>>> >>>> When did Crux lose the default position? To my mind, a sawfish without >>>> a Crux default ain't no sawfish at all... >>> >>> StyleTab became default in 1.8.0RC. No one complained (neither at the >>> proposal in Oct 10). >> >> Guess I missed that. >> >> I just tried StyleTab, and I'll just be honest - it's hideous. I can't >> imagine black going well with any default desktop themes out there. I >> don't see anywhere to configure the colors, but guess that is normal. >> >> Plus there are just a mess of buttons taking the the majority of the >> horizontal titlebar space of a full-screen window on my netbook. >> >> And I have no clue what most of these buttons do, and since there are >> not tooltips (a sawfish limitation? or?), I may never know what some >> of them are supposed to do. >> >> I guess having a tab-capable theme is a good default. >> >> Not sure how useful this rant is... or what, if any, actionable items >> I would suggest... >> >> Leaving tab support aside, who prefers the aesthetic appeal of >> StyleTab over Crux? >> >> Suggestions? > > Black goes well with any bright default-theme and most distributions use a > bright theme. Ubuntu is basically the only of the major distributions which > doesn't use one.
I think black is a bad default color. You will never see Windows use black. You will never see Mac OS X use black. And for that matter you will never see a mainstream Linux distro ship a default desktop with all-black window decorations. There is just no way. > Also Crux with it's Blue/DarkGrey won't match all default > themes, too. Yes, a colorful theme with some blue and gray may not match the user's Gnome/desktop theme, but at least it isn't going to be an eye sore straight off the bat. > Though `goes well' depends on whether you like contrasts or > not. Crux + Bright theme = low contrast / StyleTab::Dark + Bright theme = > high contrast. Fine that it's configurable - I'm just worried about the default experience of new sawfish users. > StyleTab is pretty configurable. You can change all the buttons to your > need, you can even change the position of the titlebar. Additionally > StyleTab bundles several themes, you can switch from StyleTabs settings. > > Tooltips is a Sawfish setting (Appearance > Tooltips), regardless of theme. Yep, just found that. Never needed to use that setting before. However, the tooltips seem to basically be an introspective Lisp dump, and hardly suitable for a novice/new user to make sense of. > One thing you're right is the enormous amount of buttons to begin with. But: > that's on my list of TODO for theming-1.9 branch. Cool. > Personally I and the author atleast do prefer StyleTab aesthetic appeal over > Crux. Though taste isn't a good thing to discuss about, isn't it? We don't have to discuss taste - but the default theme IS important. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it shouldn't be awful - and a pure-black theme, in this context, is awful imho. I don't think you could find a graphic designer that disagrees with me. > StyleTab became default as it showcases both Tabs and Title-Position (in the > latter regard the only theme outwhere), it's flexible and offers dark and > bright styles. StyleTab does seem to be quite nice, in terms of configurability and technical merit - and I don't want to take anything away from the hard work that has gone in to it, but that said, I really don't think, in its current form, that it is suitable for a new user. This does raise an interesting question, however - if the user is running under Gnome, is it possible to get style/color hints from the environment somehow? If not, can we at least talk about changing the default color to something more neutral? -E --- -- Sawfish ML
