Designing Matchbox Themes HOWTO. Version 0.6

Matthew Allum


Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Getting started
3. Theme.xml resources
4. Matchbox Window Types
5. Creating The Window Decorations
6. Themeing other Matchbox applications
6.1. The panel and Menus
6.2. Icons
7. Experimental Features
8. Faq
8.1. How do I create 'shaped' windows ?
8.2. How do I set a custom defualt application icon ?
8.3. How do I set the lowlight color ?
8.4. How do I set window shadows ?
8.5. How do I define a area for in the titlebar for a panel ?
8.6. Where can I find more infomation ?

1. Introduction

Matchbox allows both its visual look and interface to be defined at run time and changed on the fly. This document describes how its done, describing the creation of a matchbox window manager theme.xml file and configuration syntax for the themeing of the panel, desktop and icons.

Matchbox must be compiled *without* the --enable-standalone for themeing.

Its assumed the reader is familiar with using xml or xml-like mark up languages such as html.

This document is relevant for matchbox 0.9 release.