Blog - /Tech

I noticed recently that the Lush theme, my favorite of all the provided GNOME themes to date, is no longer shipped with the gtk2-engines-smooth package, and appears to have been abandoned upstream. In hopes of finding a quick replacement, I looked through the available XFCE themes, and found one called "Xfce-dawn" that was even better than Lush. It had a few quirks that I didn't like, however, so I modified it and called the result "Saner-dawn". It is available here. A list of modifications follows.

• Don't use any particular icon theme. I like to use the Tango icon theme instead of the one that "Xfce-dawn" chose for me.
• Use a darker shade of blue for the background color of highlighted text. I wanted Emacs to be able to use the color, too, so I chose RoyalBlue2, which is "#436EEE". In retrospect, it reminds me of the color that Mac OS X uses for highlighting text, which is one of the few things I liked about the Mac OS X look.
• Make the horizontal separation between menu items to be 2 pixels rather than 1 pixel. Having 1 pixel was too crowded for my tastes.
• Make the unselected window frame color a bit darker.
• Made the background color for highlighted text in frames to be the same as that for highlighted text in non-frame text areas.

To use this theme, do cd ~/.themes; tar -xzf /path/to/xfce-saner-dawn.tar.gz. The theme should then be selectable in XFCE and (perhaps) metacity, if XFCE is installed. Making a variant of a theme is very easy: just do cp -a /usr/share/themes/<name-of-theme> ~/.themes/ and start twiddling it.

Update

Changed tar arguments from "-czf" to "-xzf". Thanks to Weber for noticing this.