Friday 27 March 2020

Theming XFCE - Plasma Apps and Transparency (Dolphin Background) etc

I'm still playing with Theming XFCE and using Plasma Apps and Transparent Dolphin Background

I was trying to get a much faster uniformly themed XFCE that gave me most of the things I missed when I made the move back from Plasma.  I've said often that my biggest gripe with Plasma was that it is so much slower across the board than even KDE4, and the difference is ridiculous between Plasma and XFCE.  But I loved some of the little things KDE and Plasma did with theming.


In the screenshot above I have Mint 19.3 XFCE, with VLC themed to match Kcalc and K partitionmanager.
I dislike the current craze of 'flat' themes.  I also don't mind when some programs themes don't actually match each other - even within qt programs, (all Plasma apps use qt widgets).


With that in mind, when I wanted Dolphin File Manager to have a completely translucent view pane, and opaque files and folders, I had to use a different version of the theme I used for VLC and the others, because I changed a setting and forgot what it is !

Ok, after a little thought I have Dolphin themed with the buttons to match the apps above and a 50^ transparency in the panes.

Transparent Dolphin File Manager Background

The next thing is what I want the rest of my XFCE desktop to look like.  I already like the modified Azenis-One theme I am using.  And it gives a nice patterned background to text input fields like this one on LibreOffice.


Included in that is a very distinct 3D curved effect on the buttons which, while it is very different from the KvCurves3D I use in my KDE Apps, follows the general 3D and curved idea.
Here's an example:


my LibreOffice Writer looks like this now, with lots of bumpy bits


I guess I was just so sick of something as customizable as Linux, starting to look the same on every distro.
And, I was missing the little things I had going in Plasma, but lost because I hated being able to take a shower while I waited for it to load or shut down.

Of course, in all this, I still have my video wallpaper happening, but this time I am restricted to using a oval viewport so I can access the icons on the Desktop.


I almost forgot - the Azenis-One theme also has a nice flashy Shutdown Dialog:

Dolphin File Manager scrolls too fast.  This is a bug that has been around for ages.  And I could not find a solution when I was using Plasma.  I searched forums and all I found was bug reports and confirmations that there is still a problem.  And lots of discussions about how the coding is too complex to fix it.  But if you have access to mouse configuration that lets you set the scroll speed, you can do something.  Unfortunately, I don;t seem to have that in XFCE.

Also it may have been fixed already in the latest Dolphin or Plasma, but it was still a problem using Dolphin in XFCE.  However, somewhere along the line I installed a couple of Qt configuration editors.  I accidentally found a fix after installing Qt5 Settings.

So if Dolphin scrolls too quickly.

Open Settings > Qt5 Settings
Open the Interface Tab
Look at the Bottom and change Mouse wheel scroll lines
From 3 To 1

It won;t give 'smooth scrolling', but one line at a time is a huge improvement !!


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