The Appearances section allow you to change the appearance of applications that are GNOME compliant. You may recognize these applications as ones that are pre-installed with GNOME or ones that say they are built with GTK(the GIMP Toolkit).
The first option in the Appearances menu is the Look and Feel capplet. This capplet allows you to change the look and feel of certain components and widgets within GNOME applications.
There are three tabs to choose from within the Look and Feel capplet: MDI, Dialogs, and Applications Defualts.
The MDI capplet allows you to change the MDI mode for GNOME applications. You may choose amoung Notebook, Toplevel and Modal. TO BE DONE...
The Dialogs tab will allow you to change the default settings for dialog boxes in GNOME compliant applications. A dialog box is a window that is launched by an application to help perform a task needed by that application. An example of a dialog box is a Print dialog which appears when you press a print button. The dialog allows you to set print options and start the print process. The Dialogs capplet will allow you to change the following options:
Dialog buttons - Choose to use the default buttons, buttons more spread out, put buttons on the edges, put the buttons on the left with left-justify, and put buttons on the right with right-justify. |
Default position - This will let you choose how the dialogs appear when launched. You can let the window manager decide for you(or how you have defined it in the window manager configuration), center the dialogs on the screen, or drop them where the mouse pointer is when they are launched. |
Dialog hints - This will let you change the behavior of the dialog hints which are the tooltips that appear when you move your mouse button over a button or part of the dialog. You may choose to have hints handled like other windows, or let the window manager decide how to display them. |
You may tell applications to use the statusbar instead of a dialog if the application will alllow it. This will only work with dialogs that provide information not one that require some interaction on your part. |
You may choose to place dialog over the applications when possible which will help you keep your windows organized on your screen If you are familiar wiht other operating systems you may wish to keep this selected as this is how most operating systems handle dialogs. |
The Appearances capplets contains the Theme Selector which allows you to select which GTK theme you would like to run.
GTK themes are themes which allow the GTK widget set to change look and feel. The widget set is the set of tools that provide buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc. to applications. GNOME compliant applications use the GTK tool set so most of your GNOME applications will change look and feel if you change the GTK theme.
To change your GTK theme select a theme from the Available Themes list on the left side of the main workspace. If you have Auto Preview selected you will be able to see what the theme looks like in the preview window below. If you like the theme press the Try button on the bottom of the GNOME Control Center to install it.
There are a few GTK themes that come loaded with GNOME when you install it. If you would like more themes you can check resources on the Internet like http://gtk.themes.org. Once you have found and downloaded a theme you like, press the Install new theme button. This will launch a file browser that allows you to find the theme you have just downloaded. The theme files should be in a tar.gz or .tgx format(otherwise known as a "tarball"). Once you have found the file press the OK and it will install the theme for you automatically. Now you can look in the Available Themes list for the theme you have installed.
Once the theme has been unpacked into the .themes directory it will be listed in the available themes window the next time you start the GNOME Control Center.