Unity

Unity should be themeable

Bug #903179 reported by alecive on 2011-12-12

This bug affects 10 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Unity	Triaged	Wishlist	Unassigned
	unity (Ubuntu)	Fix Released	Wishlist	Marco Trevisan (Treviño)	Ubuntu ubuntu-16.04

Bug Description

This bug comes together with a bunch of other bugs already open, like for example bugs #790633 , and #790714 .

But my point of view is slightly bigger: assuming the current "poor-themeability" of Unity, there are anyhow some changes an user can do to improve/modify the look&feel of Unity itself, namely modifying images in the folder "/usr/share/unity/4" that manage the theme of the dash and the launcher.

The result could be quite encouraging and graphically better, from the user's point of view. Obviously, here I'm not talking about how good (or bad) is the current Unity look&feel, but about the fact that surely a fixed UI cannot satisfy everyone's tastes, and themeability could be a good solution.

So my idea was: why not adding a tool that lets the user change Unity theme by changing the path Unity uses to retrieve its system images?
With such a tool an user (even the less expert) can easily change Unity overall style, but without handling with system files (so to avoid him to do any damage to his machine)!

My first idea was adding something like a ccsm extension (under "Experimental" tab of Unity plugin), that lets you select custom unity themes. Obviously, these custom "4" folders should be located in "$HOME/.themes/nameofthetheme/" folders, the same as the already present "gtk-2.0", "gnome-shell", "gtk-3.0", "unity" folders (that unfortunately for now handles only unity buttons).

I added a couple of screenshot of my current Unity setup, just to give an idea about how many possibilities this tool could add to Unity itself! :)

Another screenshot: http://www.imagehost.it/di-Y93D.png

Sorry in advance for my poor english. Despite this, I hope this makes sense! :)

Tags:

Related branches

lp:~3v1n0/unity/themed-texture-cache

Merged into lp:unity at revision 4096

Andrea Azzarone (community): Approve on 2016-03-31

Revision history for this message

alecive (alecive) wrote on 2011-12-12:

Screenshot1 Edit (1.1 MiB, image/png)

Omer Akram (om26er) on 2012-01-27

Changed in unity:
importance:	Undecided → Wishlist
status:	New → Triaged

Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks) on 2012-02-01

Changed in unity (Ubuntu):
status:	New → Triaged

Robert Roth (evfool) on 2012-02-01

Changed in unity (Ubuntu):
importance:	Undecided → Wishlist

Marco Trevisan (Treviño) (3v1n0) on 2016-03-31

Changed in unity (Ubuntu):
status:	Triaged → In Progress
assignee:	nobody → Marco Trevisan (Treviño) (3v1n0)
milestone:	none → ubuntu-16.04

Revision history for this message

Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote on 2016-04-04:

This bug was fixed in the package unity - 7.4.0+16.04.20160401.1-0ubuntu1

---------------
unity (7.4.0+16.04.20160401.1-0ubuntu1) xenial; urgency=medium

  [ Andrea Azzarone ]
  * Improve the "lock on suspend" logic to always keep in sync the
    inhibitor with the lockscreen.

  [ Marco Trevisan (Treviño) ]
  * DecoratedWindow: Just send estimated extents on
    _NET_REQUEST_FRAME_EXTENTS (LP: #1368118)
  * TextureCache: add support for loading themed textures (LP: #903179,
    #1208790)
  * Unity: stop unity7 upstart instance if needed and restart it if not
    clearly requested (LP: #1555633)

-- Marco Trevisan (Treviño) <mail@3v1n0.net> Fri, 01 Apr 2016 23:11:47 +0000