Information for users:

Among the many UI improvements planned for Cinnamon 2.4 is a new graphical way to select themes.

It will look like that:

(sorry I can’t show you the entire window yet as we’re still working on it).

When you click on one of these buttons, you’ll get a list of available themes:

Information for theme artists:

Icon themes

Icon themes will simply need to have a “folder” icon. Most themes do so they should work out of the box here and be properly rendered in the new UI.

If your theme provides places in multiple colors, make sure to give each color a theme and name them by suffixing the same prefix (for instance MyTheme, MyTheme-Blue, MyTheme-Red..etc). This will allow users to switch the color of individual directories in Nemo and Caja.

Cursor themes

Export your “arrow” picture into a 32x32px thumbnail.png and place it in your theme’s cursors directory.

Metacity themes

Add a 100x32px thumbnail.png in your theme’s metacity-1 directory.

To achieve the look below and look consistent in the theme selection screen, follow these instructions.

GTK themes

Add a 120x35px thumbnail.png in your theme’s gtk-3.0 directory.

To achieve the look below and look consistent in the theme selection screen, follow these instructions (Click here to download cinnamon-preview-gtk-theme).

Cinnamon themes

Add a thumbnail.png in your theme’s cinnamon directory.

To achieve the look below and look consistent in the theme selection screen, do the following: Set your resolution to 1920×1200 Set your wallpaper to solid white. Open a terminal, the theme selector and then the background settings. Minimize all of them. Open the theme selector and move it towards the top of the screen (so it doesn’t interfere with our screenshot) Open the screenshot tool and set it to take a screenshot of the entire desktop after 5 seconds Open the calendar applet and leave your mouse on the applet Open the resulting screenshot in Gimp Use the rectangle select tool to make a copy of the left of the panel and move it towards the right, near the systray and the calendar applet Use the rectangle select tool to select the bottom-right of the picture, copy it, and paste it as a new image Use the fuzzy selection tool to select the white area and remove it by pressing Delete Export the picture as your cinnamon/thumbnail.png.



Note: You don’t NEED to do all that. In fact if you don’t your theme will still be there in the selection, but it might look out of the place. Users will enjoy not only great themes though, but themes which integrate well with the range of themes they like, so we recommend all theme artists take the time to give their theme a good looking and consistent thumbnail.