SubHuman GTK theme: making GTK play nice with Fitts

In Fitts Law and Minimalism vs GTK+ and Qt I complained about the excessive use of borders and padding in GTK+ and Qt. Here’s what I’ve got so far (click for unscaled versions):

Pidgin chat before slimmingPidgin chat after slimming down

Although work in progress still, I think the window looks cleaner already. Most importantly the chat history scrollbar now lies flush with the window edge. To achieve this, I’ve created a customized gtkrc and made a small patch for pidgin.

GTK+ theming

GTK can be themed on a per system, per user, per application or even per widget basis. Each visible widget has a style attached. The style is specified in gtkrc files, in a manner similar to CSS. A GTK+ theme is a gtkrc file, perhaps bundled with some images. The default GTK+ theme is functional but ugly, so Linux distributions usually create their own. On Ubuntu the default theme is Human. To override Human, one can:

  • Install a new GTK theme, such as ClearLooks or Human Compact.
  • Override the default theme by creating a ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file.

The gtkrc that I’ currently using is subhuman-gtkrc-20. To use this, download it and save it as .gtkrc-2.0 in your home folder. Any GTK+ programs started from then on will have padding removed. Gedit, Anjuta and Gnome Terminal respond well. Seahorse and undoubtedly others aren’t as good.

Application patching

Theming, still leaves the problem of the border and the users list in Pidgin. The border is taken care of by pidgin-chat-border.patch (attached to Pidgin bug 6987). Swapping the user list I’m working on, so no patch yet.

Next steps

The customized gtkrc file is still raw, it’s causing visual glitches such as lack of an outline around the Pidgin chat history and the Gnome Terminal VT. So my first priority is fixing those, without shifting the boundary. Apple OS X appears to draw no window decorations along the vertical edge of a window, I’d like to experiment with this. If there’s interest I’ll refine the gtkrc and release it as a GTK theme. For now, I aim to get the border removal merged into a future Pidgin release and submit a patch to swap the user list and chat history.