Difference Between GTK, Metacity, and Emerald Themes

emeraldgnomegtkmetacity

I keep seeing themes as being labelled as metacity or GTK or Emerald. From reading in other places, I gather that Metacity is a window manager and changes the window borders, so what is a GTK theme? Isn't GTK a widget toolkit, used for drawing controls and other interface elements inside the window? and what is Emerald? can somebody please explain in simple noob-to-linux terms?

Best Answer

What you are referring to as a theme is probably a different kind of theme (in light of your comment on Uri's answer).

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Those themes control GTK, Metacity (the Gnome 2 windows manager), Icons, cursors, and sometimes wallpapers all in one. However, they do not control your emerald theme. What you are seeing referred to as a GTK, Metacity, Cursor, or Icon theme is what you get when you click customize.
Each of these controls a different aspect of your interface, and of course, they are all themes in their own right.

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GTK Themes – Editing GTK Theme to Add a Border

The window border width is actually set by the Metacity theme. You can either change the Metacity theme (System ➜ Preferences ➜ Appearance ➜ Theme ➜ Customize ➜ Window Border) to one that has a window border or edit the Metacity theme you are using right now.

Metacity theme files are located in ~/.themes/<theme name>/metacity-1/ and /usr/share/themes/<theme name>/metacity-1/.

Edit your theme's metacity-theme-1.xml file and change all values left_width,right_width and bottom_height to something higher than 0.

<distance name="left_width" value="2"/>
<distance name="right_width" value="2"/>
<distance name="bottom_height" value="2"/>

Difference Between vim-gtk and vim-gnome Explained

Both packages provide the same application, but compiled with different dependencies (e.g. vim-gnome depends on libgnome2). Vim-gtk is important only to people who use Kubuntu (or some lightweight desktop environment) and don't want to install GNOME libraries. If you use the standard Ubuntu desktop, the dependencies are already present, and you can safely use vim-gnome. I agree that it could be confusing.

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