If you love to customize the appearance of your KDE Desktop, then you probably already know deKorator, a pixmap window decoration engine initially written by Moty Rahamim for KDE 3.

When I ported it to KDE 4, I did not try to improve it in any way; my first goal was to have it available at all. The only new feature in deKorator 0.4 was support for transparent themes to make use of the ARGB ability of KWin 4.3.

Today, deKorator version 0.5.1 has been released, and it comes packed with a whole lot of new features and bug fixes. I was too lazy to update the ChangeLog file (you can get the svn log from playground/artwork/dekorator, though), but since the changes need to be documented somewhere for theme writers, I decided to write a small “changeblog”.

Improved theme installation and selection

The most often reported bug required a rewrite of the theme selection dialog.

The new theme selection dialog shows previews of the themes

When you installed a theme and clicked on it in the list, it was not selected as the current theme, but you had to “apply paths” first. The feature to set individual paths has been removed from the dialog; simply clicking on a theme selects the paths automatically (you can still set them in the config file manually).

Improved detection of theme files

Another problem was that installation of themes often failed because of the strict naming requirements. Now the detection is much better, it even detects old deKorator 0.1 themes, and tries to find decoration archives inside the installed archive. Some themes still do not install correctly because of wired bugs in the theme files. For example, there are themes that have the “deco” and “buttons” directories directly in the root of the archive, without any directory for the theme name …

GetHotNewStuff support

For many themes, installation can now be done directly from the KNewStuff interface to the openDesktop.org site “kde-look.org”, where over 150 deKorator themes can be downloaded.

Download and rate deKorator themes using the GHNS dialog

Thanks to improvements in the coming KDE SC 4.5 release, you will even be able to rate themes or upload your own themes. With that, we come to a feature that will be appreciated by theme creators.

Separate images for inactive windows

User “Shirakawasuna” requested a set of different images for buttons on inactive windows, and later suggested to use Emerald compatible button files. This has now be implemented in deKorator 0.5.1.

A single image contains all button states

(the chessboard pattern shows transparency)

Inside the “buttons” directory, there are usually the directories “normal”, “hover”, and “press”, but you can now also place a single file for each button type directly inside the “buttons” directory. The file has to be named “buttons<Type>.png”, where <Type> is “Close”, “Max”, “Min”, “Restore”, etc. as before.

Example-theme/

deco/

leftTitleBg.png

midTitleBg.png

…

inactive/

leftTitleBg.png

midTitleBg.png

buttons/

buttonsClose.png

buttonsMax.png

…

normal/

buttonClose.png

buttonMax.png

…

press/

hover/

masks/

topLeftCornerBitmap.png

topRightCornerBitmap.png

…

Contents of deKorator theme archive “Example-theme.tar.gz”

This file must have six images in a single row, all equally sized. The order is “normal”, “hover”, “press” for active windows, then “normal”, “hover”, “press” for inactive windows. For compatibility, you should keep the old individual button files until the new version has been adopted by users.

Note: When porting Emerald themes, you have to rename the files, e.g. from “buttons.max.png” to “buttonsMax.png”. You might also need to add some transparent padding to get them aligned correctly within the frame, as deKorator always centers images that are smaller than the frame.

Additionally, you can now also supply separate images for the frame of inactive windows.

deKorator supports separate decoration images for active and inactive windows

Inside the “deco” directory, you can place a directory named “inactive” with the same file layout. You do not need to add all images; those that are not provided are used from the “deco” directory.

Attention! Use this feature with care! deKorator has been designed to allow the user to colorize active and inactive window frames by using the respective colors from Systemsettings, so do not provide separate images if you just want different colors. It is intended that this feature is used to make graphics for inactive windows less detailed (for example, by removing stripes or other decorations). Check the “Modern System” or “KDE 2” themes to see what I mean.

I hope that these improvements give theme writers more freedom in their design or porting efforts; I am looking forward to new themes, maybe even some with real alpha transparency.

Bug fixes in deKorator 0.5.1

Fix borders on maximized windows (requested by user “Shirakawasuna”)

Fix resize region with small borders (thanks to “Shirakawasuna” for reporting the issue, clearly seen on his “Dots” theme)

Fix “hand” cursor over buttons (requested by “Shirakawasuna”)

Fix possible crash with NoBorder option (reported by “Ace2016”, thanks!)

Fix large images being cropped instead of scaled (reported/requested by “Shirakawasuna”, clearly seen on his Reluna-Bluetiful port)

Fix stuck windows when shading windows with masks (this was first reported by “Thailandian”, and later “greggel” found out how to trigger it. Thanks to both!)

Fix spelling mistake for masks (found by “Shirakawasuna”)

Fix wrong button image “StickyDownPress” used instead of “StickyPress” (thanks to user “greggel” for reporting)

Fix partial transparency on button backgrounds (that bug was unnoticed, because there are no partially transparent themes yet)

If you find anything else that needs to be improved, please use the bugs.kde.org bugtracker.