Saturday 17 January 2009

Compact Gwibber Theme

I've been using Gwibber for my twitter account. I like Gwibber but it doesn't display as many posts in the window as Twhirl which I was using back when I used Windows. I don't want to install Adobe Air just for use with my twitter acount (although I may do so for the iPlayer). The answer was to hack myself a new theme that was more compact. I had found a theme from listento.jaketolbert.com called gw-mod which claimed to be more compact. It was more compact but not by much more, but the fact that it existed prompted me to have a go at my own.

I based my theme on gw-mod, but made the following changes:
- reduced the font sizes
- reduced the radius on the corners
- reduced the margins and padding on all the items
- set a black background
- removed the 1 pixel black shadow on the text (not needed with the darker background)

If you use Gwibber for things other than Twitter I may have broken some of the style sheet settings as I made changes throughout the CSS in the theme's HTML file, but have only tested against Twitter.

If you like the theme and wat to try it. I have linked here to an archive of my theme which I named scb-compact.

Each has a its own folder containing the theme components. The folder names appear as the theme name in the Gwibber->Preferences dialogue. To install the theme just unpack the archive file into the Gwibber theme's directory. On my Ubuntu machine the themes directory is at '/usr/local/share/gwibber/ui/themes'.

The themes directory is not writable with your standard user account so you will need to use sudo to raise your privileges to do so. These are the steps to install:

1. Download the scb-compact.tar.gz file to your home directory
2. Open the terminal from Applications->Accessories
3. Run the following commands entering your login password when prompted:
> cd /usr/local/share/gibber/ui/themes
> sudo tar -xvf ~/scb-compact.tar.gz
4. Exit the terminal using [Ctrl] D or typing exit
5. In Gwibber->Preferences select the theme scb-compact

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great, thanks for yout theme!

Steve said...

No problem its a pleasure to be able to start to give something back to the open-source community, small payment for all the wonderful free software.

SystemAdminture said...

Can you update the theme for the latest Gwibber which uses mako?

Steve said...

Bruce, I'm no longer using Gwibber so do not know of changes to the program. I either use TwitterGadget in my iGoogle page or Gravity on my Nokia S60 based phone. Gravity BTW is the best Twitter client I've seen.