Does the opening Window enhance an application's attractiveness? Should it be a picture or bland Blue and White?
Use the default OS theme colors. Anything else will be attractive to certain groups of people, and ugly to others (who will complain very loudly about how ugly they find it). If you stick with the OS theme colors, then at least your application's appearance will not be something you'll be criticized over.
Some people like it clean and nice, while others consider stylish themes to be positive and nice to have. You gotta consider who your application is pointed towards and do what that group is interested in.
I would use the default OS colors. But actually if i could, i wouldn't put any color/themes at all there. I would put some information/controls in that area (assuming you talk about the background of an MDI/SDI application). Similar to what the most recent openoffice 3 version has done. For example, put "What do you want me to do? Open / Exit / Tutorial / ..." into it.
Related
Edit: For clarity, I am not asking how to turn the sidebar on.
Not sure what to call them but this is what I mean:
In red, is what I'm calling a "folder guide". Just a nice line to help your eye better visually track the hierarchy of folders.
I'm using the Cobalt2 theme and haven't looked into alternate themes yet but it would be nice if it was possible to add something like this without changing to a new theme.
It's not possible (at least at the time of this writing) to have hierarchy lines in the tree view of the side bar such as in your image above. There is an open issue in the unofficial issue tracker for it, however.
That issue has been open for a while, but prior to the recent-ish release of Sublime Text 3 a lot of work went into the sidebar behind the scenes, so possibly something like this might be added in a future update.
Some context
I've recently switched to ubuntu budgie (from unity), and I am really tired of the Plank/panel menu combo. I cannot find a setting that suits me, because depending on my screen setup, there's always something in the wrong place.
I am literally unable to show the menu on certain edges if I activate auto-hide, and if I don't activate it, it's not nice at all, to the point that I have removed the plank thing altogether. (Am I having strange bugs on this OS, or is it really messy?)
My idea
With great frustrations come new ideas. I thought again about one I had in the past. I would like to have a circle menu that pops around my mouse cursor when I press a given key combination (very much the kind of thing you would find in some games).
The main use case is to get "pined" application shortcuts easily when I need them, but perhaps other things would fit well with them (commands ...).
Questions
So my questions are:
Does such a thing already exist?
If it doesn't, is it difficult to realize? (How much time, complexity, ...)
What tools/libraries are needed for such a project? I know I'll find plenty of explanations on the gnome developer website but I could really use some more help.
Since you mention a buggy behaviour on Plank, depending on the screen configuration, I suspect you are suffering from this bug. In short: Plank's returned values for the space it needs are not always correct in multi monitor setup.
A neat option to replace at least part of the functionality is Ulauncher, by default called from a shortcut, but you could trigger it from anything that is capable of running its command.
Since Ulauncher's window simply identifies in the window list, you can easily write a script to move it to the current mouse position.
In case you'd need any help in that, just leave a comment.
Not sure if you are also referring to quick access of the window list, but for that you could use the Window Previews applet, or even the Workspace Overview applet, so life without Plank is possible.
It would be fantastic if I could to set the colour of certain folders to aid in visual separation and navigation. Such as /public to red, /resources to blue. I'm used to Photoshop's ability to do this for layers/groups/folders and it makes it easier to navigate when you have the folders expanded and where the break points are to collapse/expand etc. My app is starting to get big and I'm wasting valuable seconds hunting files down! Ctrl+P search helps, but still, I'm a dumb human!
Surely in this magical, fully editable program there is a way? I can't find it if there us, so here I am...
As of the most recent version of Sublime Text (currently development build 3154) there is no API available that would allow core Sublime or a third party package to style the sidebar in this manner. The only visual changes that can be made are theme related, which cover the side bar and it's layout/display as a whole without the ability to target specific files or folders.
You're not the first person to want that particular feature, though. The issue tracker has an issue/feature request for Sidebar API enhancements that covers this proposed addition.
I want to create a desktop mockup on Elementary OS 0.2. By "mockup" I mean something that shows off the aesthetic of the mockup, mostly just showing what selecting/clicking/hovering over a button or widget does to that particular part of the UI. I'm thinking about creating the various parts on GIMP and coding animation and transition logic into the final result. I know that something like this can be done in HTML/JS, but I want to avoid using those. Is there anything optimized for a project like this? I'm open to most languages.
Try WireframeSketcher wireframing tool. Unlike Gimp or PowerPoint, WireframeSketcher is designed specifically to help you create mockups and wireframes. It comes pre-packaged for Debian systems and can also be found in Software Center and so it works on Elementary OS too. Note that it's a commercial tool, but you can try it freely for 14 days.
Most PMs at large companies mock these things up using a presentation package like PowerPoint. If you know the routine and where to click it can look fantastic with minimal effort.
MockupUI does both wireframe and Windows native looking mockups. It uses your desktop's visual style which makes screens and widgets look as a standard Windows application. MockupUI lets you export screens as individual images, docx, pdf or html.
Actions/interactions can be explained by highlighting widgets and adding text annotations.
I wanted to know if I can place a background image into gVim.
Can this be done programatically?
If you must, I'd suggest something along the following lines:
use a compositing window manager (e.g. Compiz on Linux, Windows Vista and Mac OS probably have analogs)
set a desktop background
make your gvim window transparent
rejoice, your text is now harder to read!
According to a trivial google search for "gvim background image", the answer is "no". I'm basing that off this thread from the Vim mailing list. Looks like they might want someone to implement the feature though, so that would make this question legitimately programming related if you asked HOW to do so yourself :)
It's been possible since 2013: see the vim-bgimg plugin.
Like rmeador said, a google search and a perusal of the vim documentation seems to imply that the answer is no. However, take comfort in knowing that you aren't alone in desiring this feature. This guy wanted the same feature and actually implemented it, at least for win32 and vim 6.2. If you really want to do this, I'd give his patches a look as a starting place, although I don't know how much those sections of the vim codebase have changed between 6.2 and the current version (7.2).
No, not yet.
However on win32 and vim 6.2 this guy implemented it.
MacVim supports transparent backgrounds if you are on that OS.