WindowMaker – LonelyMachines

WindowMaker Themes

These are theme files for WindowMaker, a window manager for Un*x-based systems. You must be running WindowMaker to use them, which also means you must be running Linux, BSD, or some commercial Un*x. If the little bar on top of this window says, “Internet Explorer-WindowMaker Themes,” you’re out of luck. That, and you paid far too much for a poorly-engineered, insecure, inflexible and proprietary piece of software that you can’t even modify without running afoul of the most powerful corporations in the world.Bummer, huh? Consider switching to Linux .

In the meantime, you can at least use the backgrounds. The files you see ending in “.tar.gz” are just the same as any other zipped file. Download the one you want, unzip it in WinZip or whatever, and pull out the big .jpg file. That’s the background. All the backgrounds are scaled to 1024×768.

If you’re one of the liberated few:

move the file to ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Themes/
type tar xzvf *.tar.gz

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Theme Tutorial

Okay, before we start, a few assumptions:

1) You do, in fact, have WindowMaker 0.6 or higher installed and running. Most distributions have it by default.

2) You have wmakerconf installed on your system. Usually, it can be found in /usr/X11R6/bin. You can check by running “locate wmakerconf” on the command line.

3) You have a working knowledge of the Gimp. If you’re running linux at all, it’s installed.

Let’s start with source material. Any image can be used as the basis for a theme. Try to choose one that’s relatively easy on the eyes, preferably one that’s not too busy, doesn’t have too much contrast…something you can stand to look at all day without scorching the retinas, basically. That’ll be your background. Second, decide just how much of a resource hog you want this theme to be. One of the great things about WindowMaker is the fact that it doesn’t generate much system overhead on its own.

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Code

WindowMaker CVS version

Well, the current CVS version of WindowMaker now compiles painlessly on Slackware, and I’ve heard it also runs fine on Fedora and Suse. Antialiasing and GTK2 compatibility are now a reality.

It’s nice to be back.

I’ve started a few new themes already. The first one is a backport of the Ultrafina site theme, which was originally an altered port of the old WindowMaker theme. Still with me? Good. Anyhow, here’s the package, and a screenshot.

Code

All the themes are fixed.

There. Now that I’ve said that, I’m sure I’ve missed a couple. Let me know.

As far as fonts go, it would appear that only the newer CVS versions of WindowMaker support anti-aliased fonts. I haven’t been able to get any of the snapshots to compile, so I can’t verify it. In any case, if they’re not stable versions, I won’t be writing for them, so I’ll continue to write against the stable (0.80.x) tree. I did manage to find a workaround to get the fonts to show up, but they’re ugly and not consistent. You can force the X Server to query the specific font directory at startup by adding “xset +fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/” to the “autostart” script in ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/. This should do the trick, although the fonts won’t be anti-aliased.

NP: 2112 Crescent St., Yasume

Code

Addendum

I’ve corrected most of the .tif backgrounds. If you’ve got a theme with a defective image, check here for the .jpg version. You can edit the “style” file manually to reflect the new image, or you can use a low-rent script I’ve written to automate the process. Just copy it to /usr/bin/ or /usr/local/bin/ , cd into the directory of the theme and type “wdefang”, and that should fix it. The script also removes pointers for the old fonts I was using and reverts them to the default helvetica.

NP: Numbers, L’usine