Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes

[Roderick Colenbrander]

Hi,

There are a bunch of uxtheme / control theming bugs which need to be fixed but lets ignore those issues for now.

In the end we need to support a bunch of different theme engines GTK, QT, Cocoa and perhaps later on more. In theory it would be possible to create a different uxtheme backend for each different toolkit. One major issue is the language which each of these toolktis is written in. GTK would be fine as it is C but QT and Cocoa require respectively C++ and Objective C. Alexandre doesn't want such languages in (although he might make an exception for the winecocoa driver if it is really, really needed).

While using a language different than C is a definitive no, I think Alexandre might allow the use of other languages in helper programs. The best way would be to write a separate program (which would have backends for all the needed toolkits) which generates a .msstyles theme (or if Vista uses a newer and better format, lets directly move to that format). The main issue would then be on how to sync themes. I guess that would need to be done at wine startup.

Roderick

> Hi,
> 
> There is a discussion going on over at
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine/+bug/111061 about
> improving Wine's look and feel to better match the system that it is
> running on.
> 
> The situation is as follows:
> 
> == Colour Schemes
> 
> Wine supports these by reading the settings from the registry. Winecfg
> can load a .theme file containing a colour profile and adapt
> accordingly (saving those settings to the registry).
> 
> At the moment, if you need to script this (e.g. when installing Wine)
> you need to manipulate the registry. It would be helpful if winecfg
> (or some other helper utility) supported setting the theme file on the
> command line.
> 
> In addition to this, if the user changes the theme used on their
> system it would not be reflected by Wine.
> 
> == Windows Theme Support
> 
> Windows theming support is in place to some extent, w.r.t. the XP
> theming APIs. There are some user32 controls and the window/dialog
> handlers that don't support theming yet and there are some performance
> issues that need resolving.
> 
> This would be set via the command line used to set the colour scheme
> since they can be set via the same .theme file. This is limited in
> that you need an XP theme for each native theme available.
> 
> == Native Theme Support
> 
> The main thing here is that Wine would monitor the native system for
> theme changes.
> 
> The colours of the native theme would be mapped to the Windows system
> colours, saved to the registry and then a WM_SYSCOLORCHANGED message
> would be sent to all open top-level windows so they could update to
> the new look.
> 
> Any metric data would be mapped in a similar way.
> 
> As for the theme, an implementation of uxtheme would map the API calls
> to the native calls. Here, it may be possible to just send a request
> to redraw everything on each active window. If not, a WM_THEMECHANGED
> message would need to be sent to all active windows.
> 
> 
> The challenge with native theme support is two-fold: (1) it should
> work on any system - some have Gtk, some Qt and some Cocoa/Carbon,
> while others (like the *BSDs and OpenSolaris) are likely not to have
> those engines available; (2) it should not break any Windows
> application.
> 
> Note that as Vista has a different msstyles theming engine (it is a
> DLL), we could have the msstyles DLL expose the uxtheme API and have
> uxtheme call msstyles to do the rendering. That way, we could have a
> gtk.msstyles, qt3.msstyles, qt4.msstyles and an carbon.msstyles that
> would bind to the corresponding theming engine. If the msstyles DLL
> does not expose those methods, the uxtheme engine could then fallback
> to the current XP theme processing.
> 
> For Mac theme support that would possibly require Objective-C code to
> be done properly, that theme could be an external package (possibly in
> darwine) that would be installed in addition to Wine. The same thing
> for the Qt engines, allowing them to directly interface with the C++
> Qt APIs.
> 
> Thoughts? Ideas?
> 
> - Reece
> 

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