The bowels of the Theme Manager, or How to make Haiku as ugly as Zeta | Haiku Project

Some people might wonder what exactly this “themes” stuff in the commits is all about. So let’s see how it all started, where we are and what’s left to do.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2008-01-25_the_bowels_of_the_theme_manager_or_how_to_make_haiku_as_ugly_as_zeta/
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Just a note: ThemeManager has been moved to a separate repository some time ago now.

This need to be enhaced more acord to the new decorators and control looks no?

I don’t think it’s right to say that zeta looked ugly. You could also change the themes there, just like under be, it was the same theme manager iirc. So one could say, as ugly as under be too.

Theming in Zeta was not just ugly, but unfinished, inconsistent, broken and ugly.

Decorators are already supported, for ControlLook I thought I did but it seems not. Not that hard really.

Hmm, no, BeOS didn’t have an official theme manager, there were some tools like WindowShade to hack app_server, and then BeTheme.
I wrote the theme manager for ZETA, and later ported it to BeOS R5 and Haiku.

Ugly, ok, since I made most of the themes, but seriously it worked quite well back then.

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There was even an icon theme manager for ZETA in which you could make it as “ugly” :slight_smile: as OS X :stuck_out_tongue:
CrystalIconThemeZeta

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What you get for using SVG icons :smiley:
I still have some ideas for patching icons in Haiku but… spoilers.

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And for haiku?

Some of the icon (themes) needed some work to be OK, but I think I made some nice icon-themes back then :slight_smile:
There was also the Human Icon theme :slight_smile:
Linux_theme

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I meant Z-Snake and things like that, sorry i did not meant your work.

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Actually Z-snake was pretty cool technically…