Lauri Watts
2002-10-16
3.1
KDE kcontrol Themes

## Theme Manager

With this module you can install, view, and even create, &kde; themes.

This page is divided into two tabs: Installer, Contents.

### Installer

Here you can install, preview and create &kde; themes. Themes created this way may not cover all the configurable options that &kde; has to offer. However, they do cover most options and are a great way to get started.

On the left, you can see a list of themes that &kde; is aware of. Selecting one of the names will change the preview image in the middle of the pane, to give you a small taste of what the theme looks like. Any information the author has provided about the theme, for example, a longer or more descriptive name, is displayed in the bottom of the pane.

Along with the normal &kcontrol; buttons at the bottom, you have four new ones to the right of the module. Add... allows you to add a new theme to the list on the left. Pressing it will open a normal &kde; file dialog, where you can browse to the location of themes you have downloaded or created.

The Save As... button allows you to save an existing theme with a new name, for example to allow you to easily modify it without damaging the original. It is strongly recommended that you use this if you intend creating themes by hand, you can get very unexpected results if there are errors in a theme file.

Create will create a theme that contains your current desktop settings. Themes created this way are fairly unsophisticated, but they are a very good start to learning to make your own.

Finally, it's very easy to collect alot of themes that look rather nice on a website, but aren't to your taste once you've tried them. The Remove... will remedy this situation, removing the theme from the list on the left.

### Contents

This page works together with the previous one, allowing you to custom fit a theme to your own needs.

Not all themes contain instructions (or images) for all the configurable parts of &kde;. For example, some contain a color scheme, a desktop wallpaper, and a style for the panel, but they don't have any icons or Window Decoration instructions.

Another common situation is to find you have finally got your own icon theme, color scheme or window decoration arrangement just so, and although you'd like to try out a theme, you don't want to mess up your current installation.

Using this page, you can see immediately what categories of changes the theme will make, and you can enable or disable its effects on those categories.

The list under the heading Work on the following parts will show you a checkbox to the left if the theme is going to affect that item, and to the right if the theme actually contains any contents for that category.

You can use the Clear button to clear all the checkboxes, and the Invert button to check all the checkboxes that are currently empty, and clear those that were checked.

For example, the Eclipse theme that comes with a base &kde; installation contains contents for all the configurable items, and is by default set up to change them all to its own settings. The MGBreizh theme contains contents for everything except the icons. The Technical theme, which you can find in the kdeartwork package, contains only the icons, so if you were to install MGBreizh, and then Technical, you would find you still had mostly the MGBreizh theme in place, but with new icons.

Taking this same scenario, what if you really didn't want the MGBreizh theme anymore, and wanted to remove it, and just use the Technical icon theme with a plain desktop?

You have two choices here. You can check the Uninstall parts of previous theme box, and then any installed theme will be entirely removed before the new one is installed. Or you could just install the Default theme, which really isn't a theme, it's more of a theme cleaner - it removes all other themes, and resets all your desktop theme settings to the &kde; default appearance.

### Section Author

This section was written by Lauri Watts lauri@kde.org.