[MonoDevelop] Random questions to adjust MD

[Bojan Rajkovic]

On Nov 2, 2010, at 3:52 PM, IBBoard wrote:

>> 
>> 4. Are there plans to improve the UI to look better under Mac/Win? I
>> don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or be flamed but there is really
>> room for improvement.
> 
> What kind of improvements? MD uses GTK, which can have multiple
> different themes. On Windows then you'd normally choose something like
> Wimp (IIRC) for the theme to look like native Windows. Personally, I
> prefer the MD look over VS.Net, but a bit of Eclipse flexibility
> wouldn't harm :)

While it would be admirable, this actually isn't /that/ easy. GTK+ theming is typically done by way of a total theme or a .gtkrc. The GTK+ theme used for MonoDevelop on Win/Mac is the GTK+ theme bundled with Mono—I don't know how difficult it would be to add themes (and their corresponding engines, if one is necessary) into the MonoDevelop distribution, but I know it would include a large additional dependency on having to build said engine for Win/Mac. I don't know what theme Mono ships on Windows, but I believe on Mac, it's Clearlooks. If you built the theme engines and themes yourself, you may be able to bundle them along with Mono and have MonoDevelop use them. The additional theme engines would probably need to go into /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/lib and the themes would need to go into /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/share/themes.

—Bojan