Re: Questions about the system

[Fred Kiefer]

Robert Burns wrote:
> However, I've noticed a one area where improvement might be needed. I
> would like to take care of this area. I refer to the way that everything
> is drawn on the screen. It appears that all of the widgets are drawn
> from within the AppKit library, and not from within a separate library
> like GTK and KDE use. IMHO, this is a serious defect, the resolution of
> which could greatly, greatly increase the appeal and attention that
> GNUstep receives. In short, I would like to address this problem by
> adding true support for theming to the library. Are there any objections
> to this? Is such an effort already underweigh?
>
> Also, is GNUstep compatible with any of the following window
> managers/desktop environments: XFCE, KDE, GNOME?
>
> I plan on doing some significant modifications to this library. My
> distro plans on including a heavily modified and improved version of
> GNUstep and GNUstep applications.

Hi Rob,

great to hear, that you want to contribute to a better appearance for 
GNUstep. I also think, this is one of the most important areas for 
improvements in this year. You seem to have some interesting ideas and I 
would like to ask you to share them with us.

Just a few months ago Adam did introduce a new class GSDrawingFunction 
and some of us are trying to move more of the drawing code over there. 
This would allow to replace some of it easyly with a theme bundle, that 
overwrites this methods. But more than just basic border drawing could 
be extracted. Here things start to get interesting, but also complicated 
and it is surely better to discuss them before starting any bigger changes.

As you know, there are some Nextstep traditionalist in the GNUstep group 
who insist on having the old Nextstep look as the default for GNUstep. 
This is something, we should stick to, but not let it get in the way, 
when opening up new perspectives, that could be enabled by users. With a 
bit of care this should not pose any problem.

What is more complicated is that GNUstep allows programmers to subclass 
any widgets and replace only part of the drawing. This is an important 
feature, that could easyly get lost, when doing a to simple minded 
widget drawing attempt. Please take extra care to preserve this, 
otherwise the new drawing code would never be excepted by application 
programmers.

Good luck
Fred