Themes/Skins

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:50 PM, Dan Meltzer
<parallelgrapefruit at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Thomas Lübking <thomas.luebking at web.de> wrote:
>> Just for the records:
>>
>> I've never "really" tried that (really ;-) BUT:
>>
>> amarok --help-qt | grep style
>>
>> --stylesheet <file.qss>   applies the Qt stylesheet to the application widgets
>>
>> In /theory/ and at least for Qt4.6 (i know that amarok does not rely on it but
>> i do not know about former Qt version support) is /should/ be possible to
>> "skin" (in the limitations of Qt enhanced css) any application - in case you
>> speak css ;-)
>>
>> In general Qt css skinning works - The detail level is "pretty much ok" (i.e.
>> it's of course not like "writing cpp" control)
>> And I can confirm (just tested) that the basic skinnig basically works with
>> amarok.
>>
>> It applies onto the current widget style and you can skin known classes or
>> object names.
>> It supports colors, transparency, various gradients and (background) images (i
>> don't think that shadows are supported so far - except of course by using
>> shadow pngs on the borders)
>>
>> So it's actually no big deal to force any kind of gradient onto the main
>> toolbar. (given your Qt version supports it and you're able to manipulate a
>>
>> The biggest problems should be
>> - pre-customized widgets (e.g. the sliders painted by the svg handler) and of
>> course
>> - any graphicsview content.
>> (Basically anything that does not on the UI style for painting)
>> - Also the performace for e.g. huge (window scale) gradients is rather "bad".
>> (ok: lousy) and
>> - object names with spaces are likely not accessable ("Main Toolbar")
>>
>> But it should definitly be sufficient for a "general mood" manipulation, so
>> this actually is more or less provided by the ToolKit.
>> If you're interested: there's a way to provide css painting support for things
>> like the sliders and still fall back to the svg theme by default. (though one
>> could of course just write a css file and adjust the svg file as well)
>
> The svg file can be edited, and that controls most of the theme.
> Amarok is fairly styleable already, we just don't advertise it because
> we don't want to support the results.

Thanks Dan for summing this up concisely. One note to all
contributors: Please try to keep your mails short and to the point.

For a variety of reasons some of us (including me) cannot or do not
want to read overly long mails. Keep it short and sweet, and
structured with paragraphs. Thanks :)

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer
www.kde.org - amarok.kde.org