Using Zeta themes, icons, UI, etc

1

I like the Zeta themes, icons, UI, look and feel.

What would it take to borrow some or all of those settings and transfer them to Haiku? Is this something that is easily ‘skinnable’? Or does this require a distro?

Thanks,
Andrew

2

Although Haiku and Zeta -in a way- are both descendants of BeOS, Zeta is very much highly modified, and Haiku uses its own kernel (okay, well it is the NewOS kernel; not its own).

A lot of work would have to go into getting Haiku to be Zeta compatible; something the core Devs are not willing to do.

3

richienyhus: I don’t think he wanted that. Just the icons and “skin”.

I believe Haiku can handle bitmap icons, so there shouldn’t be any problem to use any icon set you want, including the Zeta icons. I don’t know about Zeta, but if you have access to an installed system, you should be able to extract the icons some way or another.

Haiku is not skinnable, as far as I know, and it has not been a prioritized feature. I believe skinning will be available sooner or later, but for now your only hope would be to hack the window manager rendering code.

4

There is some working theming code in Haiku, thanks to mmu_man’s theme manager. IIRC, PulkoMandy has made it a bit more usable lately. If you build your own images, include this in your UserBuildConfig:

AddFilesToHaikuImage home config add-ons decorators : ClassicBe ;
AddFilesToHaikuImage home config add-ons decorators : MacDecorator ;

From Terminal you can then set Default, ClassicBe and MacDecorator with “setdecor”.

It’s far from perfect, but the beginnings of an infrastructure is there. For the foreseeable future however, everyone has far more important stuff on their plate, I fear.

WRT Zeta icons. I think those were supposed to be SVG, so you’ll probably have to convert to PNG first or, preferably, give them a work-over with Icon-O-Matic.

Regards,
Humdinger

5

There is support for theming in Haiku – just not skinning. The whole OS can’t change its look willy-nilly, but there is support for changing window border styles (courtesy of yours truly) and the system colors. Think along the lines of BeTheme, which is more or less what mmu_man has been doing AFAICT.

Zeta icons are SVG. I think Icon-O-Matic can import SVGs, but there also might be minor conversion issues. Then again, when it comes to icons, SVG just doesn’t hold a candle to the native Haiku format for speed and size.

There’s also a Win98-like WinDecorator, as well. MacDecorator mimics MacOS 8 and ClassicBe is a near-pixel perfect copy of the R5 theme.