Arch Linux

UnWorldly

Member

Registered: 2005-07-25

Posts: 20

Help customize ion desktop

I am trying to create a comfortable environment with the ion window manager, I am looking for something that resembles this:

I am having trouble with the colors, I would like to minimize the amount of hand-tweaking if possible. I dont want to roll my own themes and scripts if I can avoid it, but I need a few clues to help me make things look the way I want.

The first priority is clarity, I must be able to see all the widjets and they must be usable. I want the colors to be dark and easy on the eyes, too many bright colors make my head hurt after being on the computer for too long. I like the color scheme in the screenshot alot except for the blue, it could be replaced with a shade of red or green and I would still be happy.

So I am needing some things to make the colors the way I like, I need suggestions for these components which fit this dark color scheme relatively closely:
GTK theme/engine
ion style
KDE themes
.Xdefaults (with the option to change that blue color to something else)

most of my googling gives me themes which have decent colors but also have distracting eye candy, I am not looking for glossy surfaces, checkered backgrounds, rounded buttons, matrix-style bright text, but most dark colored themes seems to have stuff like that in them. So if any of you can suggest which themes I should track down to get a look that resembles this screen shot (I dont care about the gkrellm parts), I would appreciate it very much.

And while I'm at it, is there a good place to go to look at more ion screenies? I am all about finding some more ways to reduce eye strain.

xerxes2

Member

From: Malmoe, Sweden

Registered: 2004-04-23

Posts: 1,249

Website

Re: Help customize ion desktop

hello,
i added a wikipage for ion3 which should get you started, ion themes are easy to tweak (much easier than gtk') so that's no problem,
i also added a clearlooks package to community which you can use as a gtk-engine and write your own theme (i did) or find something on the web, clearlooks doesn't ship dark themes by default,
here is my current setup: http://art.archlinux.org/main.php?g2_vi … itemId=542

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arch + gentoo + initng + python = enlisy

phrakture

Arch Overlord

From: behind you

Registered: 2003-10-29

Posts: 7,879

Website

Re: Help customize ion desktop

the best way to customize ion is like this

pacman -S wmii

zing! take that you ion zealots (iphitus and xerxes2)

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http://phraktured.net

UnWorldly

Member

Registered: 2005-07-25

Posts: 20

Re: Help customize ion desktop

That looks very nice, I was hoping somebody else in here would have a similar desktop to the picture. Clearlooks does look like a nice engine, now I just need to find QT themes which somewhat match it, since I am going to end up running some qt apps too.

I heard that wmii actually takes more work to manage windows, kids told me that it was easier just to use fluxbox or something rather than speciy how all the windows should behave and stuff. I chose ion because I thought it would allow me to pay less attention to my window management and more to the stuff I am messing with, I kept getting told that wmii reqires one to work harder on managing windows which is what I am trying to avoid.

No hard feelings though, I might give it a try one day

phrakture

Arch Overlord

From: behind you

Registered: 2003-10-29

Posts: 7,879

Website

Re: Help customize ion desktop

iphitus actually has a nice setup - you can look for his screenshots in the screenshot thread

I heard that wmii actually takes more work to manage windows, kids told me that it was easier just to use fluxbox or something rather than speciy how all the windows should behave and stuff. I chose ion because I thought it would allow me to pay less attention to my window management and more to the stuff I am messing with, I kept getting told that wmii reqires one to work harder on managing windows which is what I am trying to avoid.

That stuff was removed in wmii-2... and actually you didn't have to do anything if you didn't want to - it has default layouts now... so you can't really do anything crazy

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http://phraktured.net

SleepyDog

Member

Registered: 2004-10-15

Posts: 114

Re: Help customize ion desktop

For starters, Clearlooks-Darkblue is one of the better dark GTK2 themes. The closest thing in KDE is either Plastik or Qtcurve with a dark colorscheme. If you don't want to mess around with ion themes, look_cleansteel (it's in the ion3-devel-scripts package) goes nicely with the above. I also recommend getting some nice bitmap fonts, like artwiz, since ion doesn't do xft without a patch.

And don't listen to phrakture, wmii is no good for you

UnWorldly

Member

Registered: 2005-07-25

Posts: 20

Re: Help customize ion desktop

thanks!

that helps alot

clearlooks, Plastik, artwiz fonts

I haven't been able to access iphitus' pictures, the url must have changed or something