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 and the file will unzip to a *.themed directory.
To remove a theme, simply delete its directory.
Except for the stuff in the “borrowed” section, all material on this site is my work and is distributed under the General Public License. The short form is this: you may use this stuff free of charge, and you may redistribute it, provided you, a) give credit where credit is due, b) provide a link to or a copy of the original material, and c) let me know how/where it’s used.
Newer material
Abstract material
Pastoral Themes
Science!
Simple themes
Propaganda themes
Borrowed/contributed material
10 thoughts on “WindowMaker Themes”
Thanks for posting these themes. I especially like the Foxglove one. I’m using the new Live WindowMaker distro and really liking it.
You have some really cool themes here. I never realised that WM could look as good. I knew it was cool but your themes give it that extra zing.
I’m an Arch user and am bending folks ears about WM at the moment.
Long live WM.
Wmaker is light and easy to use, I love it, and loved these themes too :)
Happy to retrieve my favourite 2005 theme (sunflower), nostalgia … Thanks ! :)
Hi,
at first a complaint: there are some (several?) wm-themes with falsely referred wallpaper-filenames. In fact their ‘style’-file refer to .tif-files, where there are jpgs contained instead. So far i encountered ‘callisto’, ‘pirsta’ and ‘barsoom’.
And secondly… I somewhat stick to WindowMaker since around Debian 3.0 or so, but hardly kept any theme i downloaded for longer than a few days on my screens (for some sort of aesthtetic reasons most of the time). Yours here in contrast are very well balanced designs, clean and beautiful. Quite a surprise to find such exquisit and ‘aged’ material ;). Very well done, and thanks for sharing.
(WM stretching the wallpapers to today’s widescreens is a little sad, though.) (On the other today’s hand, using slight shadowing with a generic compositor like compton can enrich the overall expierence to some degree.)
Best Regards,
/k.
K,
Sorry for the confusion. The 1990’s were a confusing time. The X-Files kept stringing us along, and the Spin Doctors were all over the radio. Back then, we sometimes used .tif files for backgrounds.
I later switched to .jpg, but some of the theme files may still refer to .tif images. If you find that to be the case, cd into the *.themed directory and type the following:
sed -e ‘s/.tif,/.jpg,/g’ -e ‘/Font/d’ style > style.tmp ; mv style.tmp style
That should fix it.
(I may have left some old font references in, so that will fix those as well.)
There are several comments from Greg Miller pointing out that certain themes are missing files. I have gone through my backups, and it appears those files were lost somewhere along the way.
As a result, certain themes are incomplete. I’ve left Greg’s comments up so people know which ones have problems.
If anyone happens to have downloaded them in the distant past and has an archive with the missing files, please let me know. I’d be grateful for the chance to fix this.
There is a Window Maker G+ at
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/108662612726859551678
Also an active thread here since 2012
http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.php?s=9e959f0571df990daad97f89a9a27fad&showtopic=56171
Raising the dead inch by inch.
Long live Window Maker ;-)
I. LOVE. WINDOW MAKER!!
It works flawlessly, even in today’s day and age.
Couldn’t ask for a better desktop.