Extensions to Theme Support

While poking around !Boot, I found that there seems to be at least rudiemntary themes support in the OS. However, at the moment the interface for actually changing those themes seems to be a bit complicated (it involes editing text files by hand, which while not undoable might be a bit offputting to a new user) and while I see references to the toolsprites being covered by themes, I can’t find the toolsprites in the theme files which mainly seem to be icons. Thus, I would like to propose that themes be extended to allow for different toolsprites as implied in some of the scripts and that an interface be created for actually setting themes through the !Boot control panel without needed to edit files by hand.

There is another program you can use to do all this:

http://www.lym.iconbar.com/themes.htm

I do agree with you though something does need to be done to improve the situation.

I can’t find the toolsprites in the theme files which mainly seem to be icons.

That’s because the tool sprites are stored separately. There should be another sprite file in the same location as wherever you got the sprite file you were looking at from.

The command to load a new set of icons, from an appropriate sprite file, is:

*IconSprites <spritefile>

This will load the contents of a sprite file into the Wimp sprite pool, overwriting any sprites with the same name which are already there. (In particular, any sprite in the Wimp pool called !appname or similar will appear as the icon of an application directory called !AppName.)

To replace the toolset:

*ToolSprites <spritefile>

To see the default system sprites, middle-click over the ‘Apps’ icon, select “Open ‘$’”, and open Resources.Wimp.