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getting_started.md

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Tools Required/Helpful

  1. GtkInspector
    Gtk inspector
    This is a must have tool if you want to make gtk themes or style gtk apps. GtkInspector is the built-in interactive debugging support in GTK+. It was added in GTK+ 3.14, based on a copy of the well-estabished gtkparasite. This tool is integerated natively into gnome desktop environment but disabled by default. To use this you need to follow these steps :

    gsettings set org.gtk.Settings.Debug enable-inspector-keybinding true

    launch it by pressing on the keyboard Control-Shift-I or Control-Shift-D. If you don't want to use the shortcuts, you can also run it temporarily directly when running your app with:

    GTK_DEBUG=interactive your-app

    If you get No such schema 'org.gtk.Settings.Debug' then install the libgtk-3-dev dependency by using

    sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev

  2. Color picker

    You can use any color picker you want (gnome-color-picker, elementary color picker, etc.) as long as you have one its fine.

  3. Good text editor - You might want to consider using good text editor for syntax hilighting and auto-complete for faster css.

Basic Concepts

The GIMP ToolKit (GTK) is a widget-toolkit used to create GUIs on a variety of systems (thus making GTK cross-platform). GTK (http://www.gtk.org/) is commonly and incorrectly thought to stand for "GNOME ToolKit", but is actually stands for "GIMP ToolKit" because it was first created to design an user interface for GIMP. GTK is an object-oriented toolkit written in C (GTK itself is not a language). GTK is entirely open-source under the LGPL license. GTK is a widely used toolkit for GUIs and many tools are available for GTK.

Themes made for GTK will not work in Qt-based applications. A Qt-theme is needed to apply a theme to Qt applications.

The themes use Cascading Style-Sheets (CSS) to generate the theme's appearance. This is the same CSS that web-developers use on web-pages. However, instead of HTML tags being referenced, GTK widgets are specified. It is important that theme developers learn CSS.

Theme Location

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (typically ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css)

  
~/.themes/NAME/gtk-3.0/gtk.css 


$datadir/share/themes/NAME/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (typically
 /usr/share/themes/name/gtk-3.0/gtk.css)

NOTE: "NAME" is a placeholder for the name of the current theme.

If there are two themes with the same name, then the one in the user's home folder (~/.themes) will be used. Developers can take advantage of GTK's theme-seeking algorithm by testing new themes in their local home's theme directory.

Theme Engines

A "Theme engine" is a piece of software that changes the look of the GUI's widgets. The engine reads and uses the theme's files to know how the various widgets should be drawn. Some engines come with themes of their own. Each engine has its advantages and disadvantages, and some engines add special properties and features.

Many theme-engines can be obtained from the default repositories. Debian-based Linux distros can execute "apt-get install gtk2-engines-murrine gtk2-engines-pixbuf gtk3-engines-unico" to install three different engines. Many engines are available for both GTK2 and GTK3. Below is a small list of examples.

  • gtk2-engines-aurora - Aurora GTK2 engine
  • gtk2-engines-pixbuf - Pixbuf GTK2 engine
  • gtk3-engines-oxygen - Engine port of the Oxygen widget style to GTK
  • gtk3-engines-unico - Unico GTK3 engine
  • gtk3-engines-xfce - GTK3 engine for Xfce