FLTK themes

[Ingrid]

Hi everybody!

I'm a long time forum lurker and Tiny Core Linux lover. It's by far my favorite Linux distro.

Right now I'm trying to make a TCL remake for my friends and family who are far less tech savvy than me. This group of users generally care a lot about the look and feel of the OS they run. For this reason I either have to remove the FLTK apps from the mix or I have to skin them.

The past few days I've spent searching these forums, the FLTK website and the web in general for info about how to make FLTK themes. I've found very little info this far. I know it uses a GTK like theming system, but I don't know specifically what that means. I know there are currently three themes available; default, GTK like and plastic. But that's about it. I guess there are very few people interested in this topic compared to KDE, GTK and Windows theming, but that just makes this even more interesting. 

My question then is this; can somebody here provide me with any info on how to do this, or at least point me in the direction of some useful info? I'm at a complete loss on where to look.

-Ingrid

[curaga]

AFAIK every one of those three themes is hard-coded to the fltk source.

[Ingrid]

That would certainly explain a lot. Is it enough to have to have a look at the fltk source code or do I have to theme every single fltk app?

[curaga]

If you really want to do that, you'd code a fourth theme, build your version of fltk, and remaster with that instead of the fltk we ship.

[tinypoodle]

in ~/.Xdefaults either of following lines would do:

Code: [Select]

fltk*scheme:plastic
fltk*scheme:gtk+


[tinypoodle]

Inspired by this thread I started to toy around, attached a screenie resulting of the following entries in ~/.Xdefaults:

Code: [Select]

fltk*scheme:plastic                                                             
fltk*background:brown                                                           
Text.background:green                                                           
fltk*foreground:blue


[Ingrid]

@curaga Thank you, that's very helpful! I'll look into it eventually, but it's currently over my skill level. I'll get there though, just not until quite yet.

@Tinypoodle Thanks for the screenshot, that illustrates what it's possible to do with FLTK out of the box. Do you have a complete list of the FLTK objects it's possible to manipulate in ~/.Xdefaults? Or maybe a link to one?

[tinypoodle]

@Tinypoodle Thanks for the screenshot, that illustrates what it's possible to do with FLTK out of the box. Do you have a complete list of the FLTK objects it's possible to manipulate in ~/.Xdefaults? Or maybe a link to one?

Unfortunately not. I would be interested in such myself.

[Ingrid]

Now that I've gotten some more info I managed to get some more interesting results from Google.

There is a fourth theme available for FLTK that looks rather nice in my opinion. It's called Gleam and can be found at http://www.xentalion.com/projects/fltk_gleam/ I haven't tested it yet, but I will. The source code for this should also provide a simple way to get into coding custom themes. Oh, the joy!

The full list for FLTK colors in ~/.Xdefaults is:

Code: [Select]

fltk*scheme:themename
fltk*background:somecolor
Text.background:somecolor
fltk*foreground:somecolor
fltk*selectBackground:somecolor

I haven't found any info on how to change FLTK font-faces though, so any info regarding this would be appreciated.

[tinypoodle]

The full list for FLTK colors in ~/.Xdefaults is:

Code: [Select]

fltk*scheme:themename
fltk*background:somecolor
Text.background:somecolor
fltk*foreground:somecolor
fltk*selectBackground:somecolor


Those are the same I was able to find.
I omitted mentioning the last option, as during toying around I couldn't find any visible impact produced by it.