[Sugar-devel] Appearance Customization

[C. Scott Ananian]

I'm not certain that editing the existing gtkrc will be sufficient
(although it would certainly be a good start).  As my history briefly
explained, Sugar was not designed to be 'colored' in the sorts of ways
a kid might want.  (We might care whether the text/icons are easily
readable; they might not.  Should we prevent them from doing what they
want.)

I think you'll probably also have to add some new gtkrc entries for
styles like 'home screen background', etc, to allow changing these
elements independent of the rest of the system.  Using an HTML/CSS
analogy -- the HTML has to be written with enough separate CSS style
names so that interesting CSS can be written.

It might be best to allow swapping out entire gtkrc files, rather than
allowing individual gtkrc entries to be edited.  This would make
"creating a theme" somewhat more challenging, but you could easily
allow kids to install/share whatever themes they liked, and it would
actually give the theme author a lot more low-level knobs and dials to
tweak.

But again -- I think there should also be some effort made to expose
the knobs and dials for changing the colors of various things,
although maybe that's putting the cart before the horse.
  --scott