Fast reactions to 2.7.8

[Geert Janssens]

Op dinsdag 27 maart 2018 18:44:38 CEST schreef Stan Brown:
> (1) Not a fan of the toolbar showing icons without words. I _hate_ an
> interface where you have to hover over every single icon until you can find
> the one you want.
> 
> Many programs offer "words only", "icons only", and "icons and words" as
> choices. I couldn't find anything like that. Please add it.
> 
> (2) At first I thought performance was horrendously slow, when I was
> entering transactions in the general ledger. Turns out the actual issue was
> that the Tab key, instead of advancing to the next field, just gave focus
> to the "Save" button at upper left. This was on windows 8, with Build ID:
> git 2.7.8+ (2018-03-25).

A more general note. I have done some experimentation about what can be done 
to tweak the gnucash user interface in the absence of the Theme selector we 
used to have for gnucash 2.x (that was removed from gtk for gtk3, not 
something gnucash had any say in).

It turns out that apart from really starting to customize css settings one can 
also install custom themes. It's still a bit of manual work but it's much less 
complicated than looking for individual settings. What follows can be used as 
a basis to document this on the gui tweak wiki page.

Note this custom theme will affect all gtk3 based applications on your system!

Short summary:
1. Download an appropriate gtk3 theme from www.gnome-look.org
2. Install the theme in a directory where gtk3 looks for themes
3. create or adjust a settings.ini file to tell gtk3 to use this theme

Slightly longer with platform dependent remarks:


1. Go to the gnome-look.org website
2. Click the "Gtk3 Themes" link (*not* the Gtk2 one)
3. Select a theme you like
Alternatively you can search for keywords (like "dark") in the top right 
corner and then filter on "Gtk3 Theme category"
4. If you have found a theme you like, download the proper file (in the files 
section of the theme page).

Note depending on your operating system you may not be able to open all theme 
files. I have seen for example .deb archives which are specifically targeted 
at the Debian linux distribution and derivates such as Ubuntu. While Ubuntu 
and Debian users can install those themes via their package manager these 
themes are not useful for other platforms.
Theme files ending with .zip, .tar.gz or tar.xz are likely installable on all 
platforms, although you may have to find a proper application to extract them. 
On Windows 7-Zip is a good candiate,  linux users can probably extract the 
files directly from their file manager.

So...
Let's take the theme "Eye-friendly Dark RBC" as an example (it's not the best 
theme but it can serve as an example). The file to download is "Eye-friendly-
Dark-RBC.tar.gz"

5. Extract this file using an appropriate tool. This  should give you a 
directory named "Eye-friendly-Dark-RBC"

6. Move this directory to a location on your system that's parsed by gtk. This 
is platform dependent:
- Linux: $HOME/.local/share/themes/
- OS X: Here I'm not sure. Possibly
            $HOME/.local/share/themes/ (like on linux)
      or  $HOME/Library/Application Support/themes/
  I suspect the first unless one overrides the XDG_DATA_HOME environment
  variable
- Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\themes\

7. Next tell gtk to load this theme.
Linux users can probably most easily do this by install the "Gnome Tweak Tool" 
on their platform and select the new theme there.

The manual method is this:
Create a file named "settings.ini" in the appropriate location. Again this 
depends on your platform:
- Linux: $HOME/.config/gtk-3.0/
- OS X: Again I'm not sure. Possibly
            $HOME/.config/gtk-3.0/ (like on linux)
      or  $HOME/Library/Application Support/Gnucash/config/gtk-3.0
  I suspect the latter in this case because gnucash overrides the
  XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable on OS X
- Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\gtk-3.0\

The contents of this file should be

[Settings]
gtk-theme-name=Eye-friendly-Dark-RBC

And that's it. Note the name is the name of the directory as you put in the 
themes directory.

The next time you start gnucash it should pick up this theme.

A few extra notes:
* The default gtk3 theme is called "Adwaita"
* On linux there's a second default theme called "Adwaita-dark" which should 
also give you a dark themed gnucash. Unfortunately this doesn't work on 
Windows. I suppose it's not included or improperly configured there ? On OS X 
I haven't tried this.
* If you're adventurous you can probably also play with customized icon themes 
which you find on the gnome-look.org website. These themes should be installed 
in the icons directory next ot the themese directory. And to activate them you 
can add gtk-icon-theme-name=<directory name> in settings.ini.
* Another setting some of you will be interested in is
gtk-font-name=<a font description>
for example
gtk-font-name=Abyssinica SIL Regular 10
* More gtk settings one can override can be found here:
https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkSettings.html

Regards,

Geert