firstlight Files

Thanks everyone here's why I developed this theme, which I admit looks at first glance like many other themes already available.

I wanted a simple, restrained, sober window decoration that was grabbable and had high usability and clarity. It's amazing how many xfwm themes aren't easy to use once you install them on your machine. Certainly this theme looks similar to several others, but the fashion for flatness, thin borders, super-thin or super-fat title bars, and ignorance of Fitts' principles made them all less than useful to me.

Furthermore, many interesting themes put all the creative effort into the active window, but provide a flat, pale inactive state which is unpleasant to look at. In my view windows without focus should be reasonably clearly different from the active window, but they shouldn't look like they come from an entirely different theme either.

The minimalist window buttons in my theme aren't that different in appearance from a number of others out there, but in the interests of clarity and usability I've added obvious active states, and made the active area fill the available space in the title bar. Little fiddly buttons that need precise clicks are not (in my view) easy to use, attractive, or sensible.

While there is indeed a useful keyboard and mouse combination to resize windows, it's not convenient if you prefer to use a mouse only (as some people do). Being a sufferer of back pain I am often lying on my side while computing, so it's hard to have two hands free. Being unable to resize a window easily really shouldn't be an issue on a modern operating system, and the only reason for it in XFCE is because of the way people are coding window borders. It's an easy fix, so why not do it? I realise that fashion dictates narrow borders at the moment, but I'm personally happy with well-defined windows to work in, and I wanted to see if I could make a reasonably attractive thicker borders theme.

As for the spacer/divider ahead of the control buttons, I put it in as I thought the title bar was a little plain and needed a little bit more 3D presence. I did debate including it but decided I liked it better than the plain alternative. It's easily removed by deleting the file title-4-active.xpm from the theme folder.