Window Maker, GNUstep, system themes, and their interrelation

[Morax]

Recently I've installed GNUstep (all main components and SystemPreferences)  alongside Window Maker and tried to change GNUstep themes via GNUstep's SysPrefs application. Are GNUstep theme changes supposed to affect Window Maker's appearance at all? And if yes, then how exactly should they interact with Wmaker, through which config settings and what did I miss? It would be really insightful to know, because the relation between them is virtually undocumented.

[Kostas Michalopoulos]

There isn't really much of a relation, aside from some history. GNUstep
and Window Maker are independent from each other - Window Maker uses its
own toolkit -WINGs- (for "WINGs Is Not GNUstep" :-P) that does its own
drawing, theme, etc and AFAIK its style is pretty much hardcoded. They
just look very similar (though not identical) when they're both
configured to look like classic NeXTSTEP so Window Maker is often used
as a window manager for GNUstep-based desktops.

Kostas

[Charles Philip Chan]

They are totally unrelated. However, if you want a more consistent theme
for your system, use a GTK theme on your system and use
plugins-themes-Gtk[1] for GNUstep . This will theme everything with the
current GTK theme with the exception of WINGs apps, which is
hardcoded.

Footnotes:
[1] https://github.com/gnustep/plugins-themes-Gtk

[Yury]

You might want to look at NextSpace project, too, I suppose.
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace/

[Morax]

Thanks for your answers, have Window Maker's developers thought about adding a more comprehensive preferences application or menu that will allow altering window styles, colors etc.? Currently there's only one unalterable default grey style of the window areas, for example.

[Torrance, Douglas]

Morax writes:

> Thanks for your answers, have Window Maker's developers thought about
> adding a more comprehensive preferences application or menu that will allow
> altering window styles, colors etc.? Currently there's only one unalterable
> default grey style of the window areas, for example.

The current grey WINGs theme is hard-coded into the source, and it would
take a fair amount of work to change things to make it configurable.
I have a few git branches lying around where I've messed around with it
a bit, but never finished anything.

[Morax]

The current grey WINGs theme is hard-coded into the source, and it would
take a fair amount of work to change things to make it configurable.
I have a few git branches lying around where I've messed around with it
a bit, but never finished anything.

I hope something will come out of it  

[Morax]

And also wanted to ask, if these theme settings are hard-coded, then where exactly in source code are they stored? If I knew this it would be possible to change its theme colors while compiling, wouldn't it?

[Torrance, Douglas]

On Sat 24 Apr 2021 01:38:17 PM EDT, Morax wrote:
> And also wanted to ask, if these theme settings are hard-coded, then where
> exactly in source code are they stored? If I knew this it would be possible
> to change its theme colors while compiling, wouldn't it?

Yes, it would definitely be possible. One place is in WINGs/wcolor.c, in the various calls to WMCreateRGBColor found in the definitions of WMWhiteColor, WMBlackColor, WMGrayColor, and WMDarkGrayColor. IIRC, those set many, but not all, of the WINGs colors.