One of the greatest appeals of Window Maker is the ability to customize its appearance. In the image above, several styles have been applied to standard titlebars and appicons (and can be applied to menus as well). This effect provides a simple, consistent way to give a user defined look to all window titlebars, icons, and borders. Gradients can be set to vertical, horizontal, and diagonal directions. In addition, multiple color transistions or graphics can be used to decorate them.

Expanding on this, Window Maker includes built-in support for themes. Themes allow a user to save the over-all look of his or her desktop, which encompasses the root background image, titlebar and menu textures, and tiles and icons for the Dock and Clip. There is even an option to save a user defined theme into a file, which can then be shared with other Window Maker users.

Installing themes is as simple as downloading one and extracting it into the global /usr/local/share/WindowMaker directory, or a user's personal ~GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker directory. The location may differ from system to system, so it will be necessary to double-check the global path. After the theme file has been extracted, and providing it was extracted to one of these twp directories, the new theme should automatically appear under the Appearance --> Themes menu. Selecting the theme from the menu should apply the theme's settings immediately. Note that all themes are not created equal, so if a theme is missing a defined background image, for instance, then it will apply all of the other settings defined in the theme and leave the current background as-is.

The community has produced many themes since Window Maker was first introduced. For any one interested in all the themes they could possibly handle, we encourage a visit to Window Maker Themes, which is the Window Maker specific portion of the defacto standard themes.freshmeat.net site. The maintainers do a wonderful job of keeping the site up-to-date, and Window Maker users are always submitting new themes to choose from.

 

  Top-level of Features

General Overview   Configuration via WPrefs   Advanced Menu System   The Dock and Clip   Looks and Appearance   Peformance Comparison