Tuesday 24 November 2015

Yep, I was bored.

I made a Workbench2.0 window theme for xfce tonight.


Focused

(yes i realise the depth and zoom buttons are swapped but i'm not re-taking these shots. Oh blast, the bottom-left pixel should be black too.).

Actually why I did this came about in a rather round-a-bout way.

I had to spend all day in Microsoft Windows today debugging some code and as white backgrounds strain my eyes too much I spent some time trying to customise netbeans and the system itself such that it was usable. Netbeans was a copy of the config on another machine plus a theme change and installation of the dejavu fonts. But after a bit of poking around with the 'classic windows' theme I found I could change more than I expected and set it up somewhat amiga-like, as far as that goes (wider borders, flat colours, etc). The theme editor is a pretty dreadful bit of work-experience-kid effort like most of the config windows in that shitstain of an OS shell.

So that got me thinking - it always bothered me that ALL the usable XFCE4 themes have "microsoft windows 95 blue" borders, so i poked around and found the theme I was using (Microcurve) and started randomly editing the XPMs until I ended up with this.


Unfocused

The zoom button is maximise, but the since the depth button doesn't function that way I mapped that to minimise - which will probably take a while to get used to since its no longer familiar and doesn't exactly match it's function. I had to create a new pin button which is definite programmer-art but fits the simple flat design well enough. I already had the close button in the correct spot but decided to drop the menu and shade buttons since I never use them anyway.


Pinned

I did try to have the close and depth buttons right to the edge as they should be but they get cut-off when the window is maximised, messed up if not all buttons are included in the decoration, and it meant I couldn't animate depressing them properly. So I extended the side borders to the top. I made the bottom thicker too - I cant fucking stand trying to hit a stupid 1-pixel high button to resize the windows anyway (particularly when the mouse normally lags as focus changes turning it into a detestable mini-game every time) and it adds a pleasant weight to the windows. The bottom corners are wider as well which also affects the resize handles in a positive way.

Yeah it's still blue ... but at least it's a different blue, of an older and more refined heritage.

PS gimp 2.8 is a fucking pain in the arse to use.

Update: I decided to publish what I have on a Workbench2.0 theme home page. This contains updated screenshots.

Update: Looks like CDE?

Yeah, no.

2 comments:

Solerman Kaplon said...

I don't like the white-light effect in the 3D, feels like looking at a CDE desktop or something. GIMP sucks and krita isn't any better imho, still looking around for alternatives myself everytime I need quick n' dirty stuff

NotZed said...

No accounting for taste I guess.

It's a copy of Amiga Workbench 2.0 which is from about 1991. Despite not changing the functionality or even the decoration ordering it's surprising how much nicer the machine "feels" to me.

CDE is a lot fatter and the button internals are 3D embossed iirc. It was also slate-blue or grey and burgundy?