Hi guys,

I've been using GIMP for years now, even professionally for the last year. There's one thing I still haven't ever done, and would love to do: designing a new interface for GIMP from scratch. I'm just not sure how to go about it.

I could of course take the images of another theme and edit them as I see fit, and publish the final result as a new skin. But I don't want to do that - I want to do a proper job and design one from scratch.

I have searched for a tutorial about this, but strangely enough, haven't found any.

The graphical part is not an issue. It's the technical part I'm not sure about, like for example: - how do I make sure I get all the necessary image files? Is there an encrypted theme file or something I have to unzip or whatever? - are there any additional programs I need to use to do that? - same for putting it together: Do I need to compile the images into a theme file, and if so, what program do I need for that?

And also: - are there any tutorials around about this that I might have missed - is there a popular location where new GIMP theme are hosted and shared?

There are obviously people who know how to do this, since there are plenty of good themes around. I would really appreciate it if someone could help me out with this.

Thanks in advance!

Oh and I forgot to mention: I am a Windows user, and have no knowledge about gtk or any other open-source related technical abbreviation what so ever. Which is probably the major part of my problem.

Afaik you'll have to really get into GTK2 theming because GIMP 2.8 is mostly based on GTK2 to my knowledge - only some widgets are used from gtk3. However themeing in gtk2 and gtk3 is taking place differently. In GTK3 it's mostly CSS based while in gtk2 it's not.

I however cannot give you more information about the theming itself, the only thing I tried was to theme the whole desktop environment (Ubuntu) and it also affected GIMP of course. But it was too time-intense so I skipped that ;)

Yeah after having spent a lot of time browsing the net for an answer, it became clear to me that there seems to also be a lot of coding involved, apart from the obvious graphical work. Like you, I really don't want to get into that, really not my thing. I was kinda hoping that there is some kind of nifty little WYSIWYG proggy out there that does it for you, like VLC Media Player has VLC Skin Editor. It decompiles the theme file into png images, and also the other way around.

Something like that would be perfect for me. Happen to know whether something like that is around?

sadly not. I've been searching for that too for some days, then started to adopt an existing one and adjusted values (very little). also I found that many themes are just adoptions of other ones (much code was confusing because many people tried something out). I also can't say that I found "many" good themes (I mean grey themes, that don't draw attention away from the canvas). But after some weeks of trying themes I always switched back to the system themes of Linux.

Yup sounds familiar. I guess there simply hasn't been anyone yet who has taken it upon himself to build a utility for this, like the VLC Skin Editor. As it stands now I guess the only real option for me is to edit the image files of another theme and attempt to create something that way. Since more people seem to do it that way it probably isn't a very odd way to go about it. Thanks so far for the replies mate, appreciate it! ;)

Hi ID_Graphics,

as a start you could look around in GIMPs themes folder [1]. Most of the work is editing a GTK theme configuration file, the gtkrc. This is a text file. You'll need to read and understand it, but it's no rocket science. There's also a GMOME tutorial on theming [2] and lots of other themes in the web you can learn from, for instance on the
GNOME art site [3].

The icons are in GIMPs 'themes/Default/images' folder. It's also worth knowing that the GNOME Design team worked on a suitable icon set [4]. To join your forces you should contact the GNOME visual design lead Jakub Steiner (jimmac) [5] or our user interaction architect Peter Sikking. You find at least jimmac on IRC in #gimp or #gnome-design.

Preparing your theme for deployment is - putting your files all together in a folder like the already existing themes. IMHO GIMP shipped with a modern, good-looking and unobtrusive dark theme would be a nice thing, so your contribution is welcome I think the gimp-developer mailing list would be a good place for ongoing discussions on that.

Kind regards,

Sven

[1] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/themes [2] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeArt/Tutorials/GtkThemes [3] http://art.gnome.org/themes
[4] http://worldofgnome.org/creating-gnome-symbolic-icons-with-jimmac/ [5] https://live.gnome.org/Design

Hi there Sven,

Thanks a thousand for taking the time to put together such an elaborate reply, as well as offering those links. None of them look familiar to me, so they'll at least get me that step further. I greatly appreciate it dude!

It's getting late in the evening now, but I'll surely look into what you have given me tomorrow or the day after. There's obviously a couple of things I need to figure out and as you said, it might be good to contact those people. I'm not sure whether I'll be able to get my head around the tech part, but I'm pretty sure I'd be able to find someone who would be kind enough to compile the image files for me into a theme file.

I was indeed thinking about a dark theme by the way, something non-intrusive that, doesn't distract from the canvas and is easy on the eyes, especially for those sitting behind their screen all day long (like your truly). there are already a couple of awesome themes out there (I use 'Tactile' myself, no idea who designed it but great job on that!), but I'm eager to add to the collection with my own design.

Thanks again for the help given guys, I'll get busy and I hope you guys won't mind if I post some other questions, would I run into them.

Peace.