a road to nowhere

[Johnson David]

On Wednesday 12 November 2003 07:20 pm, .VWV. wrote:

> I have tried and retried, but the result is always the same: there is
> no common style under GTK 2.x and KDE 3.x.
>
> There is no style matching GNUstep, there aren't customizable
> windowmanagers any more.

GTK+, Qt, and GNUstep are made by different projects. Their themes are 
also made by separate projects. Most of the developers (and all of the 
theme writers) are unpaid volunteers. If you want some unified themes, 
you choices are to politely encourage and convince someone to do it for 
you, or to do it yourself. That's the way Open Source has always 
worked.

I am the author of the Qt-2.x Stepstyle theme, which was as near of a 
clone of NeXT as I could get. I did not port it to qt3 for three 
reasons. First, there was little interest in it. Although it was 
popular as a "howto" to write other themes, the NeXT look itself is 
rather plain and unexciting. Second, porting to qt3 would mean a total 
rewrite, since the API has been completely changed. Third, there were 
strong rumours that Mosfet would be updating his KStep theme. The 
latter didn't happen, and with his current disappearance from the 
scene, might never happen.

I could update my Stepstyle theme. But doing so would put other projects 
of mine on hold. So before I would do it, I would need to know that 
there is interest in it. Doing all of this work for just one person 
isn't worth it to me (although renumeration of some kind would help).

On to other notes. There ARE unified themes for GTK+ and Qt/KDE. The 
best are the GTK+ default with Qt Motif Plus. Also available are 
Redmond/Windows, Keramik/Geramik, qnx/Qinx, Bluecurve (Redhat) and 
Galaxy (Mandrake). You may want to look at one of these pairs.

Of course, these pairs are not perfect. Nothing will ever be, since they 
are separate widget toolkits using distinct widget paradigms and 
policies. But they're very close.

Also, Windowmaker is not a GNUstep application, so I don't know what the 
hullaballoo is all about. Although Windowmaker is the "official" window 
manager for GNUstep, it itself does not use any of the GNUstep 
libraries, and isn't even written in Objective C.

Cheers,

David