eXperience GTK+ engine

Features

Speed

Often people just say this engine is slow. I do not think that this is true. But, it gives the user the power to create very slow themes. I was able to speed up the eXperience theme a lot by tweaking the theme.

So basically my oppinion is that just saying "The eXperience engine is slow" is wrong. You may say that the theme is slow. I have to agree, that it is not very fast.

Well, lets compare the eXperience engine to the pixmap engine. This is the only fair comparison to do. I have not done any testing in this direction (should be pretty simple, I would suggest to just port a pixmap engine theme to the eXperience engine). I would expect the eXperience engine to be slightly slower. This is because it has a different rendering model and needs a temporary pixmap. But the scaling works exactly in the same way.

BUT to complete this test, you will be able to improve the speed of the theme using the eXperience engine. This is because you can select a faster scaling algorithm, and completly remove transparent areas.

NOTE: If someone really wants to do this, you need to set draw_components = BORDER as this is what the pixmap engine does. For the eXperience engine it does not make any sense to add a special case for this.

Also I am pretty much done with a cairo port. This means that some people can get hardware acceleration.

If you set the enviroment variable EXPERIENCE_PRINT_WIDGET_PATH=TRUE the engine will print out all drawing operations to stderr (Loads of output). It prints out the class (and widget) path of the widget that is drawn, and the group used to do this. This is very usefull for tweaking apps.

Bugs

Some Ideas

Any ideas to improve the engine?

Maybe add support for themeing, how text is being rendered. That means, add a text section to the config similar to the icon section.

Something like the following might be used to draw insensitive text embossed. Patches are welcome (Maybe some other format would be smarter, but this is just about what I would like to have.)

engine "experience" {
        text {
                insensitive {
                        1 {
                                x_offset = 1
                                y_offset = 1
                                color = "#ff0000"
                        }
                        2 {
                                # text[] should of course be used ...
                                color = text[INSENSITIVE]
                        }
                }
        }
}

cairo port

Screenshots of the cairo based engine are at http://benjamin.sipsolutions.net/screenshots/experience-cairo

I started porting the engine to cairo. Well, first of all cairo is really nice! I was able to kick out large chunks of code ...