Do not install this theme using Gnome's appearance properties dialog! Untar it manually to ~/.themes or /usr/share/themes. Otherwise, the Flow-Common folder will not be included, and it is absolutely required.
When upgrading to Flow 2.0, completely remove the old version first in order to minimize clutter. A bunch of modules were moved around, so Flow-Common will end up looking very messy if you don't.
To flow means to move as a fluid from one position to another, or to move or match smoothly, gracefully, or continuously. This theme does all of the above.
This theme is based on the Murrine version of Shiki-Colors by perfectska04. It has evolved greatly from Shiki-Colors, in many ways, but is still designed to work with Gnome-Colors. I thank perfectska04 for his excellent work on the entire Gnome-Colors suite.
There are two main features to this theme. The first is its general appearance, which is on par with beautiful engines like Equinox. The second and main feature is its sheer customizability: this theme is completely modular. The meat of the theme is specified in .rc files. The gtkrc file, in addition to color scheme, icon size, and general gtk option definitions, includes these modules. This means that you can enable and disable a certain feature or customization with nothing more than the addition or removal of a single #.
The following customizations are available as of the current version:
- Smooth or glossy buttons, with the option to invert the gradient
- Smooth or glossy selected color items (progress bars, check/radio boxes), also with the option to invert the gradient
- Smooth or glossy menu items, also with the option to invert the gradient
- Standard or inverted gradient for selected treeview items
- Three shapes for sliders: pill-shaped with handle, bullet-shaped with no handle, or that diagononal bottom dealie they're using in Ubuntu's Light themes.
- Two scrollbar options: faded trough to create the illusion of connectivity, or the scrollbars right out of Elementary! Thanks to Dan Rabbit for creating the Elementary theme and open sourcing it!
- Normal, light, dark, or selected color panels
- Blended, gradient, light, dark, or selected color menus
- Popup menus using the base color, ala Mac OS.
- Blended, gradient, light, dark, or selected color toolbars
- Normal, dark, or selected color window decorations, as well as the option to replace the selected colors with normal colors
- Bold text for panel menus
- Enhancements to xfdesktop
- Enhancements to xfce4-panel
- Thunar-Elementary (requires modified Thunar, though, and is thus disabled by default)
This theme includes all of the Shiki color schemes in Shiki-style configurations, as well as two additional ones: Sublime, a teal one, and Aqua, using an ArchLinux shade of blue.
It also includes a replacement for Ubuntu's Radiance theme with the Radiance colors, and a version of that with a teal selection color called Seafoam. Two other experimental themes are included, Flow-Element, which imitates Elementary, and Flow-Shade, a dark theme.It also includes a userChrome.css that you can use in Firefox and Thunderbird to make it fit in better. Or if you're more comfortable using Stylish, you can use this userstyle: http://userstyles.org/styles/37710?r=1286044648
The Gnome-Sublime and Gnome-Light icon themes recommended by Flow-Sublime, Flow-Seafoam, and Flow-Radiance can be downloaded here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11745544/gnome-sublime-light.tgz
I do need a hand for something, if anyone's looking to help. I don't have Nautilus. I don't want Nautilus. So if anyone would be so kind as to create a Nautilus-Elementary module, it will be included in the next version of Flow. And if you want to make a module for another application, send it my way! Any other proposed improvements to the theme will be considered for inclusion as well.
Ratings & Comments
31 Comments
There aren't any themes on GTK3 that fit with this theme :(
Seconded..... Long after the fact.
I don't like the dark color of the menubar, could you possibly tell me how to remove that? thanks a lot.
Never-mind, I just found it by looking at gtkrc and comment out custom-toolbars-light part. Other question: Could color of gnome-panel be changed according to skin's color? Thanks.
Yeah, if you want to enable or disable a certain module, all it takes is commenting or uncommenting. If you just wanted to change the color of the dark parts of the theme... well, I don't think GNOME's appearance properties can change the symbolic colors I use. You can change them in the gtkrc, though. That's how XFCE users have to do it for every color of the theme. ;) dark_bg_color and dark_fg_color control what colors the dark parts of the theme are. The frame_color and inactive_frame_color ones are specific to Chrome. So. When you ask about changing the color of the gnome panel according to the skin's color... which color are you talking about? If you disable the dark panel module, it will be the bg_color. If you want the color of the panel to be the selected_bg_color, that's not supported yet. But assuming you're not using any dark widgets in your customized theme, you can just change the dark colors to whatever you want to use and turn on the dark panel module.
I usually use Flow with Fibrous [1] metacity theme, which can adjust its color according to color define of the gtk theme, so I asked. I don't mean to manually adjust color of the gnome panel, I mean could color of the gnome panel automatically match color of your theme. Thanks for your reply. [1]http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Fibrous+Themes?content=55100
I think I have an idea what you're trying to ask. Fibrous uses the theme's selected background color for its decorations. Since you've turned off the dark menu, you ought to comment all of the decoration modules while you're at it. The decoration modules' purpose is to make decorations blend with the menu bar. It shouldn't affect fibrous, but might as well be safe. Anyways, as for what you're trying to ask. Do you want the panels to match your window decorations? I could make a module for that pretty easily for the next release.
YES, looking forward to your new release, thanks very much.
Thanks for nice theme. btw where I can download Arch icon package?
If you're talking about the Arch icon I'm using for my main menu button, that's in the archlinux-artwork package. :)
Superb themes! But the download link opens the main GTKRC file in Firefox. Can you repackage and reupload? Thanks! This is amazing work, which is why I'm so excited and can't wait for the working link! Thanks for the art!
Wow! That was fast. Thanks!
I'm using the SVN version dated RFN (right fscking now) and it still gives me the same error as above (reverting to Raleigh). Not only does your theme not work, but now no other Murrine theme works either.
It seems that you really are using the same mistake that I thought mrmars was making. I don't know if I'm just in a highly irritated mood or what, but I feel the need to make this perfectly clear, both to you and to everyone: Murrine's development version has not been in SVN for MONTHS! It moved to GIT, months ago! Install from git and try again, please.
Hi, i got murrine svn (the latest, from ppa) and installed the themes to the folder, not using the Appearence properties drag and drop. (I moved the folders with nautilus, this should be ok, the flow-common is in too.) BUT i still can't use the themes! There's a big question mark upon them in the theme selection window, and if i select one of them it says i haven't shiki-metacity (which should be no problem, since these are gtk themes), and give me a win98-like aspect...
No, even if you don't have the Shiki-Colors Metacity, the GTK theme should still work. Here's what I noticed in your post. You said you got murrine from svn. Murrine was moved to a git repository some time ago. You can probably still get the svn version, but it's waaaay behind. Make sure you're using the git version instead of the svn version.
synaptic gives me: gtk2-engines-murrine 0.90.3+git20100323-0ubuntu4~ppa1~lucid 23 03 2010, it means it's about 2 months old, ain't it the latest version? Any murrine theme, even with rgba works, but flow!
Not the latest version by far, but I do know what's wrong. One unknown option, and the entire theme goes down. The cellstyle option used in theme-default.rc was added on 3/25, two days after the revision you have. But it doesn't actually seem to do anything, so I've commented it out and re-uploaded it. You don't actually need to re-download it, just go to theme-default.rc in the Flow-Common folder and comment out cellstyle = 0 on line 142.
You have a bunch of .svn folders in every theme and the file is broken. It cannot be extracted correctly.
Now that, I did not notice. I've fixed that, which means creating a new archive anyways. Does it work now?
I can extract the folder Flow-Common, but the rest give me errors from .rc files. I have a screenshot: http://imgur.com/58EVd.png The translation of the error would be: Can't open the file. It's not a folder.
Oh, I think the problem is the symlink to the folder modules in each folder. I don't know how you could fix it though.
Firstly, thanks for your help. Second, I made a new archive using tar from the command line rather than File Roller. This one should work. Can you confirm it?
It works great. Thanks for your hard work on this theme. If I may, I think it's best to put in the instructions to untar this on .themes rather than installing through the appeareance tool of gnome (I saw this theme in gnome-look), because it gives an error about the Flow-Common folder (it's not a proper theme file) and it won't be included in the .themes folder. Maybe that will save you a few questions. I wanted to ask you something else. Is there an option to make the menu items a little bigger (the main menu, I mean)? The only example I can remember is the dichotomy theme. Thanks again.
Awesome. I'll need to re-tar the icon themes too, then. I didn't know the appearance properties dialog would do that. I'll definitely modify the instructions to specify that. To make the panel menu items bigger, you can change the panel-menu size in the GtkIconSizes for the theme you're using. I think that'll work. Thank you very much! :)