Now hosted on Github! https://github.com/ailazarus/amitk -- pull requests and bug reports are always welcome.
- Version 0.1b: Gnome menubar fixes
- Version 0.2: Small menubar and toolbar fixes
- Version 0.3: Several fixes, improved scrollbar contrast
- Version 0.4: More bugfixes
A compact, non-flat, "traditional" theme, loosely based on late Amiga Workbench look, based on Clearcodes theme.
Still clunky, as I've hacked it up in about two afternoons, after getting sick of themes made for tablets, but actively maintained and getting better.
Screenshot notes and credits:
- Framework: Tobias Bengfort's Clearcodes theme
- Icons: Ken's Icons, repackaged by a kind gnome-look.org user, untouchable89
- Wallpaper used in screenshots: various works by sed (https://sed.deviantart.com/)
- Desktop used is FVWM. The structure is based on taviso's legendary .fvwm2rc, but the whole thing is quite heavily customized behind the scenes.
Installation tips, misc. notes:
- export GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0 in .bashrc gets you always-visible scrollbars for real computers
GTK and application support:
- Applications I frequently use with this theme: Emacs, Firefox, Thunderbird, PCManFM, Deadbeef, Xarchiver. These will get immediate fixes, since they'll bug me right away.
- Support provided on a best-effort basis for Mate applications
- Support provided on an if-possible basis for Gnome 3 and Cinnamon applications: I'll gladly make fixes as long as they don't involve breaking anything else (unfortunately, this is a rather frequent occurrence in GTK3), they don't require working around application-specific hacks and, frankly, if I can figure out how.
- Does not include GTK2 theme, but I can look into it if there is much demand
- GTK3 support: GTK3.22 and possibly GTK3.20. No support for earlier versions. Please bug GTK developers about that.
Maintenance notes:
- This theme is currently maintained. If you have questions, suggestions, bugs to report or anything else, feel free to contact me. Contact info & co. in README file.
- Support is *only* definitely going to be provided for the latest stable GTK3.x version. Support for other versions, down to GTK 3.22, will be on a best-effort basis. Earlier versions probably won't work. I'm sorry if I break your desktop, but GTK developers seem to have way more free time than I do :-(.
FUTURE PLANS:
- Move to Qt and drop this GTK mess forever
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gnome-look specific notes: If you downloaded version 0.1 instead of version 0.1a, that one has a valid gtkrc under gtk2.0. That's not mine, and it got there through an error -- it's the BellePintosGrande gtkrc. Through an unfortunate error (I wanted to place something under gtk2.0 because I had a hunch that missing it makes mate-theme-properties skip the theme when reading through the ~/.themes file) I left it there, even though it was only used during development. It obviously doesn't quite fit in with the AmiTK looks, and more importantly, it's not mine to redistribute. I removed the stale file, of course, and re-uploaded an archive that doesn't include it, but I'm leaving this note in case anyone comes back wondering why the hell GTK2 applications look like Motif apps. It's because my brain froze while I was taring things up :-).
Ratings & Comments
23 Comments
6 6/10 as on Gnome the headerbar is blending with other headerbars (esp on Nautilus) , is it possible to change the un-focused window to have somewhat different colour accent ? eg bit darker... thanks!
Nowadays I use Fusion, which is very space-efficient. That's what I recommend everyone to at least try. It's not necessarily the look that I like most, but it does its job, it's well-supported and will probably be well-supported for the foreseeable future. Other options are: - QtCurve ( shameless plug: I also made this: https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1204702/ . I didn't struggle too much to make it look like post-3.9 AmigaOS (which I never used anyway), but it took me like five minutes to get something that looks good to me so it was good enough.) - Qt has a gtk2-style, and most of the older, and excellent GTK2 themes still work. Vertex, basically the only modern GTK3 that doesn't suck, also works fine with this Qt style (it also has a GTK2 theme in the package). Do not that the -styles package was recently moved out of the main Qt tree, so I don't know how much longer the second option is going to work. The former is great but you sort of need KDE to tweak it properly. IIRC the Skulpture style also has a Qt 5 port, but you have to compile it from source (not a big deal IMHO).
Quick update. I have looked into a GTK2 version. Unfortunately, getting consistent looks between GTK2 and GTK3 is extremely complicated; even if it were possible to get the shape of (most) widgets right, a lot of things continue not to match, like the Open file... window, and there is simply no way to get it right. 60% similar is doable. 80% is maybe doable, but with far more time than I have on my hands. More than 90% is, IMHO, utterly impossible in a way that is maintaineable with GTK3. Consequently, I will *not* be releasing a GTK2 version of this theme. All I can recommend is: 1. Switch to a desktop environment that respects its users, and is preferably written using a toolkit not tied to Gnome. KDE, LXQT or your favourite homebrew system are excellent alternatives. I originally wrote this theme so that I could keep using applications like Atril (formerly Evince), which I used for years before they got butchered up in Gnome 3. It turned out to be a failure as well. 2. If you cannot do that, for whatever reason, pester the GTK and Gnome develoeprs to finish with GTK's eternal beta once and for all and support application developers so that they can move to GTK3 entirely. 3. Alternatively, sponsor any effort to keep GTK2 ports going, and use any of the excellent GTK2 themes that have been working for a decade now. I myself have gone by the #1 route months ago. I will continue to maintain this theme for as long as there are people using it (hence the three containers I have, for running Gnome, Cinnamon and XFCE). However, I believe that if you value the Free Software community, the efforts of thousands of *independent* developers who value their users more than they value the corporate paychecks which sponsor their psuedo-FOSS work, and software freedom in general, you should move away from anything Gnome-related.
So you swithced to qt? And what theme do you use there?
Huh. This website is a little weird. I replied (!? posted !?) to the wrong comment. Re-pasting below -- with apologies for the belated replay, but I was in beautiful, sunny Crete when you wrote and typing an answer from a phone was too tortuous to even attempt. Nowadays I use Fusion, which is very space-efficient. That's what I recommend everyone to at least try. It's not necessarily the look that I like most, but it does its job, it's well-supported and will probably be well-supported for the foreseeable future. Other options are: - QtCurve ( shameless plug: I also made this: https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1204702/ . I didn't struggle too much to make it look like post-3.9 AmigaOS (which I never used anyway), but it took me like five minutes to get something that looks good to me so it was good enough.) - Qt has a gtk2-style, and most of the older, and excellent GTK2 themes still work. Vertex, basically the only modern GTK3 that doesn't suck, also works fine with this Qt style (it also has a GTK2 theme in the package). Do not that the -styles package was recently moved out of the main Qt tree, so I don't know how much longer the second option is going to work. The former is great but you sort of need KDE to tweak it properly. IIRC the Skulpture style also has a Qt 5 port, but you have to compile it from source (not a big deal IMHO).
Ah, by the way: if you do like the classic Amiga look, it's pretty easy to get QtCurve to look reasonably close to it with very little work, most of which is point-and-click. It's not as flexible as GTK3 theming, there's no doubt about that, but it's also a lot less work, Plus, a lot of the non-flexible things do at least work -- e.g. I'm not aware of any way to get *custom* scroll button images with QtCurve, but you have to tweak shit and export custom environment variables in .profile to even *get scrollbars* in GTK, and for some reason they work like mobile scrollbars no matter what. I'd pretty much take the less flexible scrollbars over the other crap every day, thank you :).
Cool! Thanks for the answers! :-)
Hi Notalaser, amazing job with this theme! Do you mind sharing your FVWM config?
Unfortunately, I don't have the config files anymore, but it was really just a trivially-tweaked version of one of taviso's more famous works. Trivially-tweaked as in just a couple of different icons and an integrated xdg menu. If you google for taviso's fvwm2rc you'll get various results from a bunch of people, with various tweaks. I think this is a mirror of the original: http://fvwm.sourceforge.net/screenshots/desktops/Tavis_Ormandy-desk-1152x864/fvwmrc .
9 Absolutely great job, especially on how compact the objects are. Definitely looking forward to the GTK2 version of it since most of my daily applications are still GTK2.
Thank you! I've been looking over some existing GTK2 themes to try figure out the most important idioms. It's doable. Unfortunately, thanks to GTK3 being the mess it is, it's *highly* unlikely that I'll ever be able to get 100% similar looks. Far more experienced theme developers have been unable to do it (see e.g. the various Clearlooks ports). I'll do my best, but I'll be blunt about it -- your best chance is to stop using GTK altogether. I myself have stopped using GTK applications shortly after publishing this theme. I'll maintain it for as long as I can, but the best advice I can give is to look for software built on saner foundations :(.
Worry not mate, not even Numix managed to get 100% consistent between GTK2/GTK3 and they've been playing with the same theme for years now. I'm just looking for "close enough" where the difference is not jarring. I'm currently using OneStepBack since it's based on similar principles as yours (conservative styling, toned down colors, complete opposite of "in your face") but I must admit AmiTK looks quite a bit nicer, especially since you put emphasis on being compact which I greatly appreciate as a user of 1280x800 display. The more content I can see at any given time, the happier I am.
> I'm just looking for "close enough" where the difference is not jarring. It looks like it's all that's possible right now. I'm really disappointed with the state of these things. It's like we're back in 2002. > The more content I can see at any given time, the happier I am. This has been an explicit motivation for me as well. Large widgets that make me roll my eyes all over the screen are very tiresome to use, I really don't understand how people manage to use these things. Maybe on 4K screens, or really tiny tablet screens, it makes sense, but for real computers... it's a step backwards, IMHO, and I really don't know what to do on the long term.
9 ++
> Move to Qt and drop this GTK mess forever Unfortunately I heard of no way to render Qt themes via GTK engine, only vice versa (via QGtkStyle). But we are living in a land where half of applications use Qt and half of them use GTK. So people would prefer GTK themes over Qt themes, since they will provide uniform look for both Qt and GTK. I hope somebody will do a heavy lifting of adding GTK3 support to QGtkStyle. Then you will have no need to create AmiTK GTK2 version theme :-)
I've been playing with moving away from GTK3 applications entirely lately. Except for Firefox and Thunderbird, it seems feasible -- everything else either has straight Qt equivalents, or can still be compiled with a GTK2 frontend, which works with QtCurve.
Ah, QtCurve, you're right. Sadly it's adds more overhead than QGtkStyle, but there were good themes for it. Hope they will get GTK3 support one day.
I doubt it will ever get GTK3 support. GTK3 no longer has support for theme engines. It only supports CSS themes now. At best, I can imagine a framework theme over which one can come with a QtCurve-like settings customization system, but that's pretty much all. IMHO, unitary looks between GTK3 and Qt will only happen for visually-trivial for the foreseeable future. That's why I'm not holding my breath for compatibility.
Damn. I mean visually-trivial *themes* above, but there's no edit button :(
To give you some motivation. qt4 and qt5 applications can use gtk2 themes with help of qtstyleplugins package https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Uniform_look_for_Qt_and_GTK_applications#QGtkStyle So by adding gtk2 theme anyone can get an uniform Amiga like look of applications using popular gtk2/3 and qt4/5 toolkits :-) To give some more motivation - by doing quick search I've only found Amiga OS 4.x looking gtk2 themes, nothing with earlier look.
The Amiga BlueTabs themes for GTK2 were really, *really* good, I used them for a very long time. I'll be blunt about it -- the only reason why I targeted the earlier looks is that it's a little easier. I basically learned CSS in order to write this theme, so I'm by no means an expert, and most of the GTK3 themes I've seen are *a lot* of code; having written one, I now understand why -- there are a lot of hacks needed to get GTK3 looking right, and I have no idea how I'm going to make all of them. Oftentimes you fix something for an application only to find out you've broken something else. It's quite a mess :(. I haven't written GTK2 themes, but those seemed a lot less fragile. I can't promise a GTK2 theme, as there's a lot of learning effort involved (I haven't written any of those, either, but that's just because I havent' felt the need). But I'll look into it and bump it high enough on the TODO list that, as soon as I have a couple of free afternoons, I'll try to come up with something decent. I totally understand why supporting GTK2 is a good idea. XFCE4 still has a lot of GTK2 applications, and with all the problems that GTK3 has, I'm not at all surprised that a lot of users still prefer it.
> the only reason why I targeted the earlier looks is that it's a little easier At my taste the earlier look is better :-) New look is too sugary, reminds me Windows XP design era.
It's really great to see more and more oldschool gtk themes coming. Thanks! And yes, gtk2 support will be appreciated :)