Skinning WAS Change the Green Online Icon to an Icon reflecting the IM Protocol?

[Luke Schierer]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2007 at 01:52:38PM -0400, Ethan Blanton wrote:
> Chris Forsythe spake unto us the following wisdom:
> > Good, so I guess this leads to the next question I had, which is, what
> > would it take for Pidgin to load Adium Xtras, with the current Xtra
> > formats?
> 
> Well, that's a good question.
> 
> Emoticon themes could be pretty easily handled from within Pidgin, if
> we simply understood the Adium format; we don't.
> 
> Widget themes and icon themes are currently handled in Pidgin via the
> Gtk+ mechanisms for each.  These can also be configured from within
> Pidgin (the Gtk+ Theme Configuration plugin does precisely this), and
> so a mechanism could be created which read Adium Xtras themes and
> poked their values into Gtk+ as appropriate; this is likely to be
> somewhat more fragile than emoticons (as we don't make all the rules,
> in that case), and one would have to be very careful not to create Bad
> Interactions with the basic underlying Gtk+ theme.
> 
> Generally speaking, I think these things should be solved where they
> live, which means that the Gtk+ stuffs should be configured by Gtk+;
> this would mean making Gtk+ understand Adium widget themes, I guess.
> 
> Note however that Adium's widget themes are *far less* flexible than
> Gtk+ widget themes in many ways, and what looks good in a buddy list
> may or may not look good in other dialogs and windows.  This may be an
> argument for handling Adium themes inside Pidgin, and restricting
> their effect to the widgets which comprise the buddy list.

I think we have pidgin set to read a gtkrc file in ~/.purple which would
prevent these styles from impacting other applications.

luke