Martin Ankerl » release

Clearlooks Compact Gnome Theme

Martin Ankerl — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 20:59:42 +0000

I have been using Ubuntu for quite a while now, but one thing I really dislike is that all the themes are huge space wasters compared to Windows XP. This finally got me angry enough to create a customized version of the Clearlooks theme that tries to be very compact but still maintain its beautiful look. I like the result quite a lot, I have been using this theme for more than two weeks now and it works great. It is especially nice for intense applications like Eclipse.

UPDATE: Human Compact Theme for Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) is available!

Comparison

Move your mouse over the image to see how the dialog looks like with clearlooks-compact. The buttons and spacing are smaller, which results in much more visible space for the actual content.

More Screenshots

Here are some more screenshots that I have taken with Clearlooks Compact enabled. Especially the Eclipse shot is great, there the theme really shines. It is even more compact than the Windows XP look.

If you are curious, I have used Tahoma, size 9 for the application font, and the MiscFixed for the sourcecode.

Download & Installation

Installation is extremely simple, in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) you can do it this way:

Click System > Preferences > Appearance.
Drag & drop the link ClearlooksCompact-1.5.tar.bz2 into the Appearence window.

Beware that this is just definition of the Clearlooks control spacings. That means you have to have the clearlooks engine installed (which you most likely have, it is the default theme of Ubuntu). To change back, click on the currently active Theme, choose “Customize”, and select other controls instead of “Clearlooks Compact”.

History

I will regularly update this page when I update the theme with a new screenshot and the development history:

April 9th, 2009: Version 1.5: a bit smaller checkbox + selection box, less blurry and smaller progress bar.
April 5th, 2009: Version 1.4: added LGPL, index.theme, version number.
April 11th, 2008: Version 1.3: Small panel menu
November 11th, 2007: Version 1.2: Major update: Smaller handlers sizes, smaller scrollbars, no scrollbar spacing, less overall padding, and some more.
November 7th, 2007: Version 1.1: Now even more compact by reducing the default icon size to 16×16 pixels.
November 4th, 2007: Version 1.0: First release of Clearlooks Compact.

New Release of XDCC-Fetch

Martin Ankerl — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 14:41:09 +0000

XDCC-Fetch is a nice little application written in Ruby that is able to download from XDCC bots on IRC. I have updated it to work with fox 1.6, so this should work with the recent Ruby version.

Screenshot

Unfortunately I don’t really have the time nor the interest to continue development for XDCC-Fetch. Please contact me if you are interested to continue development.

New Release of Dice-RPG

Martin Ankerl — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 14:19:00 +0000

I was bored today so I have updated my little program Dice-RPG to work with fox 1.6.

What?

Dice-RPG is a free dice throwing program that can be used for role playing games. Although I have never played a RPG in my entire life, my brother forced me to write this tool for the good of mankind (actually, I wrote it because I did not have anything better to do, but don’t tell him).

Here is a screenshot:

How?

To use Dice-RPG,

Install the Ruby one-click installer from here if you don’t have it already. This is a runtime, like Java or C#.
Download Dice-RPG.rbw (right click and save the link) and doubleclick it.

Have fun!

RFind – Quickly Find Files

Martin Ankerl — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 19:35:05 +0000

RFind is a little application that indexes the filenames of a given directory, and allows to quickly search this index with regular expressions.

The motivation behind this app was that someone thought this had to be in C++ to be fast, so I proved him wrong: search-on-typing with more than 500,000 indexed filenames is easily possible

I have tried to make this little tool very configurable so that is can be useful to everyone. Some of the features are:

Hierarchical presented search results
Search-on-typing
Define rules to execute on mouseclick

Download:

rfind-1.0.zip

This tool is written in Ruby and requires fxruby 1.0, which is a bit out of date. I will try to update it to a recent version of fxruby soon.

e updated

Martin Ankerl — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 12:26:41 +0000

I have updated the extraction utility e with several new extraction rules. It now contain 28 different rules for extracting archives. This means it can extract zip, rar, 7zip, gzip, bzip2, rpm, deb, cab, arj, ace, ppmd, lzo, tar.bz2, tar.gz, tlz, tar.lzma, ar, cpio, dar, uharc, zzip, and some more with a single common interface if you have the tools on your PC. Get it here.