Increase the resizing space for the windows in XFCE4?

[Paul..]

Thanks, Stevo. More troubles down the road, then...I thought I was beginning to get my arms around it...

It's not boring, I'll say that.

[asqwerth]

Yes, the Debian package uses the arc-theme original source code, which doesn't ship png, xpm, or anything but the text vector image svg files. The build process then uses Inkscape to generate all those other elements during the build, also adapting to whatever version of GTK+3 it's being built against. There are also some numbers that can be plugged into the build that affect the scaling of the elements, as well as the colors.

It's easy to just take a finished xfwm theme and plop it into the themes folder, but arc-theme doesn't work that way.
The problem with the xfce-only themes are that they don't support GTK+3+ applications, so those will appear with different borders and title bars, leading to a lot of questions here.

I don't understand the issue with this. MX's default DE is gtk2 XFCE. XFCE specifically has separate window manager theming, so mixing and matching between WM and gtk themes is possible. Yes, a WM theme's grabbability does not affect gtk3 applications (gtk3 apps with their client-side decorations are weird anyway), but we are still using gtk2 XFCE, so that means a lot of key programs like Thunar or terminal are still gtk2.

By all means backport Arc theme so that grabbability in Arc is improved for gtk3 apps as well.

By why can't we also separately package Rich's "borders" WM theme, which adapts its looks to whichever gtk theme you use, yet provides great grabbability? That would help when users are using other themes apart from Arc, e.g. numix, greybird.

There is precedent for separately packaging WM themes:
Obsidian theme is found in MX17/18's Popular apps, because it was an Adwaita-dark equivalent that worked better than the original in XFCE (original has too much "padding" surrounding icons on the panel) and MX15/16's Adwaita-xfce-dark was no longer maintained.
But Obsidian didn't come with an xfwm4 theme. So we also separately packaged the WM theme from the old Adwaita-xfce-dark theme to use with Obsidian. And note that Obsidian's gtk3 look is very different because its min/max/close buttons are bright blue circles. I feel that one cannot do much about gtk3's CSD anyway. It's just going to look different from most normal windows.

[oops]

Yes, the Debian package uses the arc-theme original source code, which doesn't ship png, xpm, or anything but the text vector image svg files. The build process then uses Inkscape to generate all those other elements during the build, also adapting to whatever version of GTK+3 it's being built against. There are also some numbers that can be plugged into the build that affect the scaling of the elements, as well as the colors.

It's easy to just take a finished xfwm theme and plop it into the themes folder, but arc-theme doesn't work that way.
The problem with the xfce-only themes are that they don't support GTK+3+ applications, so those will appear with different borders and title bars, leading to a lot of questions here.

... So for you, to provide a greater "grabbability", the best and universal way is probably to ask XFCE dev. to provide a parameter (a magnetic behavior, with 0 or 1 ou 2 or 3 pixels more) via the .svg text files for the themes ?

By Paul: Nice!!! many thanks for simplifying this process, asqwerth...this is a nice workaround..

+1

[Paul..]

I don't understand the issue with this. MX's default DE is gtk2 XFCE. XFCE specifically has separate window manager theming, so mixing and matching between WM and gtk themes is possible. Yes, a WM theme's grabbability does not affect gtk3 applications (gtk3 apps with their client-side decorations are weird anyway), but we are still using gtk2 XFCE, so that means a lot of key programs like Thunar or terminal are still gtk2.

By all means backport Arc theme so that grabbability in Arc is improved for gtk3 apps as well.

By why can't we also separately package Rich's "borders" WM theme, which adapts its looks to whichever gtk theme you use, yet provides great grabbability? That would help when users are using other themes apart from Arc, e.g. numix, greybird.

There is precedent for separately packaging WM themes:
Obsidian theme is found in MX17/18's Popular apps, because it was an Adwaita-dark equivalent that worked better than the original in XFCE (original has too much "padding" surrounding icons on the panel) and MX15/16's Adwaita-xfce-dark was no longer maintained.
But Obsidian didn't come with an xfwm4 theme. So we also separately packaged the WM theme from the old Adwaita-xfce-dark theme to use with Obsidian. And note that Obsidian's gtk3 look is very different because its min/max/close buttons are bright blue circles. I feel that one cannot do much about gtk3's CSD anyway. It's just going to look different from most normal windows.

I agree 100%

[oops]

Aha! It was the other rich!
Yes. Unfortunately his opendesktop link is no longer available, and I don't have his "sneaky camouflage" version that blends with Greybird.

I've downloaded from rich's link when he posted it here in the forum xfwm borders theme.
See attached tar-file.
Yes, it works great. Using the theme-switcher, @oops mentioned above, the thick borders change also nicely.

Yes, it works great here too. even with the theme-switcher (thanks Fehlix) with the Arc-Dark-MX-Borders.zip theme here into the $HOME/.themes/ directory.

(Also here for new users or remaster iso; /etc/skel/.themes/Arc-Dark-MX-Borders/xfwm4)

[philotux]

I've downloaded from rich's link when he posted it here in the forum xfwm borders theme.
See attached tar-file.
Yes, it works great. Using the theme-switcher, @oops mentioned above, the thick borders change also nicely.

Just copy, say, the Greybird-mx16-thick-grip folder to your $HOME/.themes folder, rename the main folder to something like "Greybird-MX-thickWM", then within the main folder, REMOVE all subfolders except for the xfwm4 one. You can even delete the index.theme file from the main folder.

Now, when you open the Appearance>>Style tab, you won't see it because there is no gtk theme attached to this folder. But if you open the Window Manager settings, you'll see it.

Thank you for this! It works great here! What a relief not having to pin that tiny point down. Totally improved "grabbabilty" : )

And thank you all in this thread. I have watched your co-operation and communication, truly impressive. No wonder why MX Linux is such a great OS. I wish you all the best and the brightest of future for the OS you have build together.

best regards,
"philotux"

[Stevo]

Why didn't we rebuild the thick-grip greybird themes for MX 17 again? It seems that they work well.

I'd also like to get the newer arc-theme with thicker borders into main, since that's the default and will be an automatic update--everyone using it just magically gets somewhat thicker borders, though I'd like them to be even thicker for this 1080p x 15 in screen. But I'd be using the hdpi version anyway for this screen, so maybe not such a big deal.

Other xfwm border themes are not anywhere as hard to configure and build into deb packages as Arc--but I'm pretty swamped at the moment with package requests and normal updates. We could use some more people on the packaging team, and xfwm-themes are fast and easy to package, even on the lowliest 32-bit netbook or oldest machine that can run even antiX, since no compiling is involved. Excluding arc-theme since it does a load of CPU-intensive image rendering from the svg files.

[philotux]

I'd also like to get the newer arc-theme with thicker borders into main

Is this the one in the test repo?

[asqwerth]

I've downloaded from rich's link when he posted it here in the forum xfwm borders theme.
See attached tar-file.
Yes, it works great. Using the theme-switcher, @oops mentioned above, the thick borders change also nicely.

I already provided a download link to the above wm theme earlier in this thread.

Note that this is different from rich's adaptable "borders" wm theme, for which I also provided a separate download link.

viewtopic.php?p=479776#p479776

[asqwerth]

Why didn't we rebuild the thick-grip greybird themes for MX 17 again? It seems that they work well....

Other xfwm border themes are not anywhere as hard to configure and build into deb packages as Arc--but I'm pretty swamped at the moment with package requests and normal updates. We could use some more people on the packaging team...

MX15 used greybird for both gtk and wm theme. So the greybird thick grip version was important for that release. MX 16 continued to use greybird fully but with slightly different panel and whisker colour so greybird thick grip version was repackaged for the colour change.

But in mx16.1, we switched to using arc dark just for the wm theme and have stayed with that.

So for mx17 (now gtk 3.22) I guess the grabbability of greybird's wm theme was not relevant for the default anymore..

To be frank, I also thought it was because the gtk 3.22 greybird theme had slightly better grabbability than the gtk 3.14 version for mx 15/16.