Theming for Wine via the registry

[Scott Ritchie]

This thread on the forums caught my attention:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=86939&highlight=wine#post86...

1) Is there a way we can make Wine respect the current GTK themes?
Wasn't someone working on this a while ago?  What's the status?

2) If I want to hack around this by changing the default registry for
the Ubuntu packages, what's the best way to do that?

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

[Mike Hearn]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 00:16:16 -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> This thread on the forums caught my attention:
>
> http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=86939&highlight=wine#post86...
> - Is there a way we can make Wine respect the current GTK themes?
>
> Wasn't someone working on this a while ago?  What's the status?

Yeah, but it's an awful lot of work. It basically means rewriting the Wine
widget drawing code to support themes, and then writing a uxtheme<->gtk
bridge layer.

Bridging just the colours is inadvisable. It works OK for the new
Clearlooks/Human theme but for some themes (eg Industrial) it looks
horrible. That said we should definitely alter the Wine colour scheme, in
fact it came up internally in CodeWeavers a few days ago.
> - If I want to hack around this by changing the default registry for
>
> the Ubuntu packages, what's the best way to do that?

Just have a custom .reg file and run it through regedit in the postinst
script.

thanks -mike

[Oliver Stieber]

On Saturday 12 March 2005 14:08, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 00:16:16 -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> > This thread on the forums caught my attention:
> >
> > http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=86939&highlight=wine#post86...
> > - Is there a way we can make Wine respect the current GTK themes?
> >
> > Wasn't someone working on this a while ago?  What's the status?
>
> Yeah, but it's an awful lot of work. It basically means rewriting the Wine
> widget drawing code to support themes, and then writing a uxtheme<->gtk
> bridge layer.

I may look at this in the future, it's important for wine to integrate with any accessibility tools provided by either QT or GTK if wine is to reach UK accessibility requirements, 
using GTK and QT widgets seems the best way to do this. has anyone looked at doing this in the past?
> Bridging just the colours is inadvisable. It works OK for the new
> Clearlooks/Human theme but for some themes (eg Industrial) it looks
> horrible. That said we should definitely alter the Wine colour scheme, in
> fact it came up internally in CodeWeavers a few days ago.

Some of the colours can be transferred like window background, to get part of the way there.

[Mike Hearn]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 17:25:58 +0000, Oliver Stieber wrote:
> I may look at this in the future, it's important for wine to integrate
> with any accessibility tools provided by either QT or GTK if wine is to
> reach UK accessibility requirements,
> using GTK and QT widgets seems the best way to do this. has anyone
> looked at doing this in the past?

Ah, that's different. That'd actually require using Gtk/Qt which we cannot
do, the best we can get is to look like them.

To be fully accessible we'd need to implement the OLE Accessibility
framework and bridge it to AT-SPI or something similar.
> Some of the colours can be transferred like window background, to get
> part of the way there.

You'd think so, but I've seen a screenshot of Wine "Industrialised" and it
was truly terrible, unusable even. You really need to use the proper
widget drawing code to make it look good IMHO if the colours are very
different to what Windows normally uses.

A good start would just be to import the Win2K colour scheme.

thanks -mike