The Famous Five ­ Part 1

KDE is one of the most customizable desktops available. While customization may not be as important in the office as other KDE features, a discussion of KDE would be remiss if it didn't touch at least briefly on this hallmark feature. There are five primary "look and feel" categories in KDE, the so-called "Famous Five."

1. Widgets

Interface elements such as buttons, menus, and scroll bars are referred to as widgets. The look, feel, and even behavior of the widgets can be changed substantially by selecting different widget styles. The Style control panel allows you to select a widget style, as well as choose from various effects such as menu transparency and widget animations. There is even a live preview of the selected style that makes picking the perfect style that much easier.

Some styles, such as "Lite" and "dotNot," opt for a simple minimalistic look. Others deliver whiz-bang looks and stunning dynamic effects. Great examples of such fancy styles include Mosfet's famous "Liquid" style, as well as the beautiful "Keramik" style that is new in KDE 3.1.

Most KDE widget styles are C++ plugins. This allows for great flexibility and some stunning effects. The actual plugins can be found in the $KDEPREFIX/lib/kde3/plugins/styles directory. While many styles are available in binary form or come with KDE, building styles that you download is quite simple:

% tar zxf hotNewStyle.tar.gz
% cd hotNewStyle
% ./configure --prefix=`kde-config --prefix` && 
make && make install

2. Window Decorations

The title bar and borders around windows are called window decorations. The look and behavior of window decorations can be customized in the Window Decorations control panel. In addition to picking a specific look, the order of the window buttons (close, minimize, etc.) can also be controlled from this panel.

Window decorations come in several formats. Many are C++ plugins while some are pixmap-based. KDE even supports icewm themes'. The more advanced KDE decorations often exhibit interesting and unique behavior. For instance, the "BII" decoration provides BeOS-style tabs on the windows that can be moved by clicking on them while holding the SHIFT key and dragging the mouse. The "Glow" decoration features animated buttons.

3. Colors

Depending on your personal preferences, environment, and widget style, the right color scheme can make all the difference in the world. The colors used by KDE widgets and window decorations are defined in the Colors control panel. Several predefined color schemes come with KDE, and users can create their own custom schemes. These color schemes can be shared with others as KDE color scheme (.kcsrc) files. Custom schemes are saved by default to $KDEHOME/share/apps/kdisplay/color-schemes.

4. Fonts

Fonts have long been a thorny issue for Linux desktops. However, with the addition of antialiasing and improved scalable fonts to XFree86, things have improved considerably in recent times. KDE continues to integrate these enhancements.

A recent addition to KDE is the Font Installer control panel. This panel allows easy installation and management of fonts on a KDE system. You can set which fonts are used by default in KDE applications in the Fonts control panel. The Fonts control panel also controls font antialiasing settings, including subpixel hinting.

5. Icons

For many people, being able to alter the widgets, windows, colors, and fonts is enough flexibility. But it wasn't enough for the KDE artists and developers who introduced the concept of icon themes. Icon themes allow users to change all of the icons used by KDE applications with a single click of a button. KDE ships with no less than five icon themes of varying styles and color depths.

To change icon themes, go to the Icons control panel and pick from the list of themes available. If you have downloaded a new theme, you can add it by clicking on "Install New Theme..." and choosing the new theme you just downloaded. Icon themes are usually distributed as tarballs, but you don't need to decompress a theme to use it. The Icons panel does the work for you.

Icon themes can be found in the share/icons/ subdirectory, as well as the $KDEDIRS and $KDEHOME directories. Each theme comes with an index.desktop file that describes the contents of the theme. Themes can also "inherit" from another theme. This allows a theme to be distributed with just a few specific icons; missing icons are supplied from the inherited theme. This makes it much easier to create and distribute icon themes without having to create replacements for each of the 1,800 icons in the default icon set.

In addition to different sets of icons, the Icons control panel allows you to assign dynamic coloring effects to differentiate icons in their normal, active, and disabled states, as well as to set the default sizes used. This allows for some stunning effects such as grey icons that bloom into full color when the mouse is passed over them. The Icons control panel also controls icon animations (that were added to KDE 3.0).

There are dozens of nooks and crannies around the KDE desktop that you can customize. From desktop backgrounds to application launch feedback to MacOS-style menubars to the fonts and colors used in the filemanager, you can make KDE look just about any way you want to. This wealth of options has resulted in a thriving community of artists that have generated a wealth of backgrounds, themes, styles, and add-ons for KDE users to choose from.

Some of these exciting new look options are set to arrive with KDE 3.1, including the "Keramik" widgets and a new set of "crystal" icons. This new look can be seen in Figure Two, as it appeared in KDE's development tree at the time of this writing.

Also, be sure to install the kdeartwork package to get more icons, wallpapers, screensavers, window decorations and widget styles!

For even more KDE eye-candy visit KDE Look, the authoritative on-line resource for KDE add-ons, at http://www.kde-look.org.

Listing One: A sample shared KMail configuration file

[General]
Default Identity[$i]=0
transports[$i]=1
accounts[$i]=1

[Identity #0]
Drafts[$i]=drafts
Email Address[$i]=$USERMAIL
Identity[$i]=Default
Name[$ei]=$username
Organization[$i]=Acme Inc.
Reply-To Address[$e]=$USERMAIL
Transport[$i]=Acme