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by cosmic_cheese 427 days ago
Even before that, GTK app theming was a bit hit or miss, likely because of the way GTK uses CSS for themes.

Personally I believe CSS to be quite ill-suited for the purpose. It’s ok if you’re writing a theme for a bespoke one-off app but breaks down in the system theme use case. In particular, CSS inheritance makes for a lot of unnecessary trouble for both third-party themes and accessibility affordances.

Last I knew there was something of a disinclination away from paramaterization in the GTK dev sphere too, which is another significant problem for third party themes and accessibility. Hardcoded fonts, colors, etc makes for pointless brittle rigidity.
2 comments
ChocolateGod 426 days ago
GTKs CSS engine is great for app developers because it's powerful and easy. You can make something look slick with little work.

But its terrible for themers, it's like running a CSS override on every site that runs Bootstrap and expecting it to work properly. It won't.

I don't run any themes anymore so it doesn't bother me.

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WD-42 426 days ago
Before css there were engines, which were like families of themes. One of them was the pixmap engine which was what it sounds like: it used images to make up elements of the theme. Some of the most ambitious themes used this engine. CSS didn’t come until much later.
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cosmic_cheese 426 days ago
Yeah I recall having to install engines for some themes. One of them was murrine I think?
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