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Re: [platform-dev] Linux: handle problematic GTK3 themes
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On 1/7/19 10:29 AM, Thomas Singer wrote:
Hi Eric,
On 07/01/2019 16:21, Eric Williams wrote:
Hi Thomas,
On 1/7/19 4:30 AM, Thomas Singer wrote:
Hello,
It looks like some GTK themes cause more problems on Linux than
others, e.g. we have a couple of problems with Mint-X on Linux Mate
17.1.
According to <https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.20/gtk-running.html>
it should be possible to change the theme of a certain application by
setting the environment variable GTK_THEME before launching the
application (ours usually is launched from a .sh script so adding the
"export GTK_THEME=..." line would be no problem). Unfortunately, this
does not work - it simply uses the default Mint-X theme.
We have support in SWT to read the GTK_THEME environment variable, so
this should work. How are you using it? IIRC the theme has to be
installed on the system in order for GTK_THEME to work.
In my Linux Mint installation I can select, e.g. "Clearlooks" in the GUI
for the controls. Adding
export GTK_THEME=Clearlooks
before launching SmartGit has no effect - it still uses the system
setting of Mint-X.
This should be working, does it work with native applications? Maybe
Linux Mint forces the system theme somehow.
How do you actually manage the problems of different themes in
combination with SWT? Do you suggest the users to switch their system
theme? Do you abort the application with an error if a known buggy
theme is detected?
SWT only officially supports the default GTK theme (Adwaita). A lot of
themes follow the Adwaita style of declaring colors and other such
things so it's usually not an issue, however there are exceptions. In
these cases we do not try to fix issues in broken themes as there are
no manpower/resources to do so. It's not really SWT's responsibility
to fix broken GTK themes anyways.
From the user perspective it looks like the SWT-based applications are
broken, because native applications simply work. Usually, users also
don't want to change the system theme because it looks good for them and
they might have selected it because they like it.
That said, if your theme is "difficult" and causes issues in SWT, you
can feed some GTK CSS to SWT via the
org.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.cssFile property. SWT will load the CSS
in this file at startup. I believe bug 527729 had some discussion on
this matter.
Thanks you.
Quite related: why some controls, e.g. buttons, in native GTK
applications look so different than the ones in a SWT application?
GTK has a concept of "minimum size", i.e. if you try to resize an app
below a certain size it will just deny the resize all together. SWT has
API for absolute sizes regardless of minimum size, which can cause some
conflict in GTK.
Some themes really exacerbate this disparity by having large padding
around widgets like buttons, text entries, etc. They look good in native
GTK because they never get shrunk small enough, but in SWT they do and
then you see the ugliness.
Eric
