Style Settings

Introduction

The visual appearance of ST/X's widgets is controlled by so called "StyleSheets". A style sheet defines the visual attributes such as 3D-level, color, indents and orientation/position of subcomponents.
All styleSheets are found in the subdirectory "styles" under the "libview" package directory.
When the system starts or when the style setting is changed, a corresponding styleSheet file is read and a message (#updateStyleCache) is sent to all widget classes. Each class will extract and cache the relevant data for its newly created instances. Instances are supposed to take the style as effective at creation time and keep the values in local instance variables. This should make existing views immune to future style changes. However, some widgets have been programmed in a lazy fashion and class-values are fetched at redraw time. Therefore, it is a good idea to reopen any windows whenever the style changes. (we though about caring for this, but came to the conclusion that dynamic style changes are usually not really needed and that the effort is not worth to repair this)

There are many experimental or abandoned style sheets found in this directory - some even look very ugly. Please ignore them. We will "officially" only support a small subset of styles. Currently, we recommend using the "windowsXP" or "windowsVista" style. If you are an old fashioned hard-core unix freak, try the "sgMotif" style, for that good old Silicon Graphics Workstation feeling of the 90's.


Copyright © 1998 eXept Software AG, all rights reserved


Doc $Revision: 1.1 $ $Date: 2009/10/29 18:10:16 $