Custom widgets for lxde applications

Stephen Smally eco.stefi at fastwebnet.it
Fri Aug 24 17:37:25 UTC 2012


Hi everybody, some time ago 神癒礁湖 (Rafaellaguna) sent me a mockup of 
the future light-software-center, and he told me that he and Alex 
(another lubuntu designer) were working on standard widgets for lubuntu 
applications ("Even Alex is working on the standards, we should make a 
common interface for everything, like the compact menus, as a standard 
for any Lubuntu app."). The mockup is the following 
http://imagebin.org/225735 (as you can see, it contains a brand new 
About Dialog, a pathbar and a compact menu).

So my question (and proposal) is: Is a standard lxde widgets library a 
good thing?
I personally don't like when a gtk app require another library for 
widgets (such as libxfce4ui), because it looks to me like an added 
weight. However, i started appreciating this with the granite library 
(used for elementary os widgets), and i started thinking about a lxde 
library seriously (i called it liblxui, but i don't like the name a lot).
In my plan, the library should be:
* Written with Vala (simple development + C and vala api) and Gtk3
* Themed within Box (or whatever) via css, using another Gtk theme the 
widgets won't look strange.
* Lightweight, of course, just few widgets (about 5 or 6), no Services 
or patches as in granite

I included the lxde list, even if this is thinked primarily for Lubuntu, 
id obviously strongly lxde-related.

Thoughts?

Stephen Smally



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