I agree. There is actually no need for themes - Xt/Motif already have all functionality for customization. GTK and Qt need themes only because they don`t support existing standards (X resources) - that`s why I always considered them "evil" -). All Motif (IMO) needs is an easy-to-use, CDE-alike, xrdb frontend which would allow changing colors/border widths etc. for all Xt/Motif applications.

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I totally agree, we could say about Motif like one said about Linux"... Motif IS user friendly; it is NOT idiot-friendly nor ignorant-friendly"

If anyone can type, they can program Motif`s UI, if they can`t learn VERY simple rules of Xt resources... theme support and management will not really help on that (i even think this will be Motif`s grave... One thing we could do is to make some kind of manager (yup here goes the Amigan MUI example again), to make resources programming more intuitive (i know that `intuitive` is dumb word`, couldn`t find an other though) )...

The design calls for most of the support for themes to be in an engine external to the Motif library. It will be dynamically loaded when a certain resource is set.

In any case, our changes to the base Motif libraries will be patches, so you can always chose not to include them. I suspect for a while, we`ll be running seperate binary downloads and will not force the themes enhancements on anybody. People can then chose whether the increased functionality will be worth it or not.

BTW for you SGI fans, as I recall, one of the first themes will be to mimic the SGI environment. We like it here too!

Mark

I couldn`t agree more. I believe that once a facility is in place that works well all that remains is to show people how to use it, not keep adding more ways to do the same thing. In this case Xt resources provide a complete solution to look/feel.

Maybe a little GUI wrapper over xrdb would be a nice project for the folks who hang out here?? Or maybe it`s time for an updated version of editres?

Good point. Editres is a little sluggish and not very convenient. In the project section I can only see theme-support listed. It would be great if application development/porting applications are included (coordinated) also. Possible projects
* mxterm developers needed for patching xterm
ftp//ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandrake-devel/SRMS/xterm-131-4mdk.src.rpm
old mxterm ftp//ftp.uni-magdeburg.de/pub/mirror/hpux.ask.uni-karlsruhe.de/X11/Misc/mxterm_color-5.pl26/

* xmeditres
* launcher by galaxy
* Ishmail (ishmail.sourceforge.net) some bugs. Or better yet, get communicator linked dynamically against OpenMotif...
* VDX crashes a lot (UIMS)
* freedomlite gpl`ed filemanager nice drag`n`drop.

Perhaps the people at lesstif.org would like to help as they do have an enormous amount of experience.

IMHO the future of motif lies in its applications. The competing toolkits have increasingly more functionality/widgets and I`m smelling fear of getting behind by implementing theme-support.
I don`t think you can keep up with the `contesting` developers as you`re probably outnumbered. Therefore, get people on your `side` by offering stability. speed and supporting applications (a good step would be to get communicator released dynamically with openmotif). If you really want to keep motif alive, make people depend on it and use it. Offering yet `another` toolkit won`t be much of a competition with KDE/Gnome on the run.

I`m currently hacking VDX. For the first time all I do is mostly bugfixes, gcc 2.95.2 support and some other minor improvements.
xmeditres is a very nice idea. I thought about it before but didn`t start the project due to the previous Motif license issues. Widgets/classes tree on the left, resources list on the right, with color/font selectors... it would be cool -) Implementation, anyone?

Great ideas!

I would love to see some competing projects to our themes approach. We would be happy to host a xmeditres improvement project. Or if you want it to live somewhere else, we would also be happy to post pointers to it here so that people can find it more easily.

We would also be happy to host (or track) other Motif/lesstif/X oriented projects. For example, I think that many people are unaware of the wonderful Xlt widget set that the lesstif folks host. Getting that and Xbae ported to Open Motif would be useful.

Regards,

Mark