User-defined user interface themes

[sergey-feo]

(Excuse me for my bad English :-) )

QT- and GTK-based programs can have "skins". Window managers can have themes.

I suggest make such feature in mc and make some default themes:
— theme without pseudographics for users that have problems with locale and use mc to solve it;
— default Borland Turbo Vision-like theme that uses only pseudographics from CP437 encoding. This pseudographics symbols can be used with many 8-bit encodings;
— enchanced theme wich uses all power of Unicode pseudographics.
In this theme we can do following replacements:
[x] → ☑ / ✓⃞ ;
[ ] → ☐ / ⃞ ;
(*) → ◉ / •⃝ ;
( ) → ○ / ⃝ ;
With Unicode we also can add "✓" to "OK" buttons and "✗" to "Cancel" buttons. It will be like pictograms. Also "⚠"/" !⃤ " and " ?⃝ " can be used as pictograms for some dialogs, "⌨" in keyboard settings. If mc somedays will use DeviceKit?-disks then "⏏" symbol can be used for ejecting media.

---

Regards, Sergey

[slyfox]

Cool. Which fonts support such stuff and how to detect it?

[andrew_b]

You still talking about TYU, not GUI?

[andrew_b]

Replying to andrew_b:

TYU

TUI, sorry...

[angel_il]

it's no good :)

[sergey-feo]

Cool. Which fonts support such stuff and how to detect it?

Unicode stuff is supported at least by DejaVu? and Liberation fonts family that presents in all major modern distros.

We should not detect what fonts terminal uses for mc. In place of it we should detect current locale and encoding used in this locale. This detection is trivial task.

You still talking about TUI, not GUI?

I still talking about TUI, yes :-)
It can be much more interesting that current.

Please look at ​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Norton_Utilities_6.01_UI.png
This is real TUI, not GUI! It used its own special fonts.

I attach an tar with screenshots of DN. The TUI of this program IMHO is one of the best TUIs. One of mc themes can follow it.

[angel_il]

attach your patches.

[andrew_b]

Replying to sergey-feo:

Please look at ​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Norton_Utilities_6.01_UI.png
This is real TUI, not GUI! It used its own special fonts.

I attach an tar with screenshots of DN. The TUI of this program IMHO is one of the best TUIs. One of mc themes can follow it.

How many platforms those programs are run on?

[angel_il]

Replying to andrew_b:

Replying to sergey-feo:

Please look at ​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Norton_Utilities_6.01_UI.png

How many platforms those programs are run on?

you know this :)

[sergey-feo]

How many platforms those programs are run on?

NC 5 and NU 8 run only under DOS.
DN runs on DOS, OS/2 and in alpha stage on GNU/Linux.

Please note that application interface should not consist of minimum set of elements that available on all platforms. Many supported platforms should not mean that TUI must be primitive on all platforms.