User interface tweaks (was Fast reactions to 2.7.8)

[Stan Brown]

Thank you, Geert.

Should this invitation maybe go in the Wiki, or the help file?

-- 
Regards,
Stan Brown
Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com
http://OakRoadSystems.com


On 2018-03-31 08:37, Geert Janssens wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
>