the "look" of subsurface

[Lutz Vieweg]

On 04/05/2013 11:44 PM, Rainer Mohr wrote:
> Does it have to be "so grey"?

If GTK+ was supporting the X11 X-Resource extension that most older
widget toolkits (like Xt, Xaw, Motif, Tk, ...) readily supported,
you could easily use "editres" or .Xdefault settings to configure
colors, fonts, shapes etc. (see e.g. the bottom of
> http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/urz/kurse/unterlagen/unix-ben-umgebung/ofl_resourcen.html
for screenshots of editres).

But GTK+ as well as Qt were implemented by people who were either
not educated or ignorant of pre-year-1990 IT achievements, so this is
not an option here.

> Maybe I just don't have a clue about GTK or whatever, but the look of
> the GUI is just not what I have in mind when it comes to the happy
> memory of my dives.

Hmm, then you could fix the issue by diving in murky waters above
sandy bottoms on cloudy days - perfect fit! :-)

> Just had the thought, that it's funny, that I get welcomed to the "21st
> century" for changing to UTF8 and the optics of subsurface tend to
> remind me of Windows 3.11 :-)

I remember vividly how Tk was chided back in the 80s for introducing
some non-grey default colors in the GUI. Even though completely
configurable, people demanded that only grey was "professional".

> [enter your preference here] ?

A green on black monochrome look using monospaced fonts?
(No, I'm not really _that_ retro. ;)

> Don't get me wrong, it's a great software, but it doesn't "look
> friendly" to my eyes and it's simply not modern when it comes to the
> looks...

The problem with "modern" is that it is a very subjective criterion
and if you try to follow some "majority vote" you will have to migrate
to a different look every other few months.

I prefer the "form follows function" approach, and putting efforts
more into functionality rather than the looks.

Regards,

Lutz Vieweg