claws-icon themes project
after not having written (and to be honest: worked on) much lately due to illness and the christmas holidays i thought i'd give a quick sign of life.
something i've been working on during the last year is porting icon themes to my favorite mail-app, claws-mail. it's fast and lightweight, not as visually-unappealling as its alter ego sylpheed and features tons of plugins that do everything i want them to.
now, why would you port icon themes for an application and why doesn't this app feature gtk-icon theme integration?
i've had this discussion several times, even on #claws (freenode) and after a while i decided i generally agree with the arguments brought forward in favor of having a separate icon-theme. the main problem is that an application like claws uses a lot of icons that you don't find in most gtk-icon themes. maybe the golden middle path would be to use gtk-icons as far as possible and have fallbacks for the rest. but i assume that since this is not really an itch for the devs it's not really going to be considered (unless of course, someone is willing to submit a patch).
ok, since we've cleared this out i want to quickly (and chronologically) introduce three icon themes i made (by the way: a complete icon theme for claws usually contains around 150 icons; a draft of what's needed is found in the claws faq). the first two themes are already featured on the claws-mail themes site.
1. hash_303030 (inspired by ALLGREY by aMADme)
an icon theme i made with the aim of keeping things rather monochrome and iconic (meaning: no complex images). i haven't published any updates on this theme in a while, but i know it's far from perfect and has a few serious design flaws.
its panel-icon is designed for a dark panel whereas the rest of the icons rely on a bright gtk-theme. this is due to the fact that it's the setup i personally mostly use.
2. gnome-brave (ported from gnome-brave by Victor C.)
a theme i made for integration with the gnome-colors themes - well, mainly it integrates with the blue gnome-brave (which was used by default in Xubuntu by the time i created it). i would say it has less flaws than aforementioned theme, but in a way there was a lot less to do (and think about) than with hash_303030. with most important decisions i kept in line with my previous thoughts (mostly: how do you create the crazy-massive amount of different folder icons).
3. elementary (ported from elementary by Daniel Foré)
this theme is unfinished (as you can even see in this screenshot; it uses gnome-brave as fallback), that's also one reason why it's not yet on the claws-theme site. i decided to port the widely popular elementary theme (based on versions 2.2 and 2.3) for claws. even though there are a few things missing it's already quite usable and i hope i can finish it in the course of this month.
i also had a port of the popular Eikon-theme (which is a mix of several themes) in the works but its obscure licensing situation made me decide i won't publish it.
if you have feedback or thoughts on any of the themes i'd be happy to hear/read. also there are certain things i'm never too sure about (like how to deal with the "hrm" and "mark" flags as they don't exist in any icon theme i know of, apart from the standard claws-theme obviously; or gpg related icons), so i'm grateful for input in many fields.
other than that i hope that those of you who use claws might find one of the themes appealing (just a sidenote: i personally still stick to hash_303030, maybe for sentimental reasons, maybe i've just gotten too used to it to switch or maybe the simple, monochrome thing is just what i like).