Theming Tricks, for the Inspired Artist

The goal of this page is not to tell you how to design and implement a theme from scratch. If you are entirely new to theming it is suggested that you look elsewhere. The goal of this page is to convey some of the trickier and/or less documented parts of theming.

Resources

[http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/metacity/metacity-themes.html Designing Metacity Themes] by Glynn Foster.

[http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk-Resource-Files.html GTK Resources Files] documentation.

Tricks

Suggesting a Wallpaper

In your index.theme file put a line like "BackgroundImage=/absolute/path/to/image.png" under the X-GNOME-Metatheme header. For packaged themes wallpapers should be asumed to be placed in /usr/share/wallpapers.

FIXME: Is it possible to set a specific solid color, or a gradient?

Setting the Background on Nautilus Special Places' Headers

Put something like the following in your gtkrc:

• style "extra-view-widgets" {
  • # Fx. The special header in Nautilus Search and CD Creator bg[NORMAL] = "#CD6127"
  } widget "*.nautilus-extra-view-widget" style:highest "extra-view-widgets"