I like curves

Submitted by illogic-al on Sat, 10/03/2009 - 21:23

And who doesn't? Like curves I mean. I'm not just talking about any old curves here though.
The QtCurve style for KDE is, as far as I can tell, an attempt to unify the desktop UI experience between Gnome and KDE, and a darn good one at that.
This isn't why I'm heaping praises on it today though (and again pouring shame on Qt's mac skin). Crap I just gave it away. But yeah, qtcurve makes KDE apps suck SOOOOOOOOOOOOO much less on a mac by sheer virtue of them not looking like complete and utter crap. And by suck less I actually mean it makes them enjoyable to use for long periods of time. I know, madness.

So what's it all mean? It means I'm once again using my favorite audio player of all time, Amarok, on a regular basis. iTunes is still used but much less to play music. KMail's also been getting pretty heavy usage. It's on its way to being my day to day mail client once more. Again, because Qtcurve makes using it actually enjoyable rather than just bearable.

If you'd like to try it out, it's not exactly straightforward though so here's what you'll need to do.

  1. Download QtCurve for KDE.
  2. Extract it.
  3. Enter the directory.
  4. Edit the file style/qtcurve.cpp
  5. Delete the line with #include <QX11Info>
  6. Install to the root kde folder. /opt/local for macports.
  7. If you've installed from macports edit ~/Library/Preferences/KDE/share/config/kdeglobals and add:
  8. [General]
     widgetStyle=qtcurve
    
  9. Copy a custom qtcurve theme, if you'd like (you'll see them listed after make install), to ~/.config/qtcurvestylerc
  10. (Re-)launch your program.
  11. Enjoy a pleasant looking (I'm looking at you Qt style) and responsive (I'm looking at you Macygen style) user interface for your KDE progs.

I should mention that there is a much better way to fix this, ifdef the QX11Info include based on OS. Surely anything non X11 and therefore non-Unix will have no use for this.
I've contacted the author via the spectacularly awful kde-look.org messaging system (whose captcha system seems designed to prevent spam by just discouraging people from messaging outright). Maybe this change will be incorporated into a new release of QtCurve. I wouldn't hold my breath though.

One of these days it might make its way into macports though, once I figure out how to:

  1. Make it so that QtCurve is used as the default style. I'll probably just lie and overwrite oxygen's theme file
  2. Modify the qtcurve mac theme and colors to look a bit closer to OS X.

And no. No screenies (or links) for you. I'm tired!

P.S. Amarok's icon sucks (wasn't this going to change? It makes my dock feel so dirty).
P.P.S Amarok 2.2.0 is a solid release. If you've been holding back because of the 2.0-ness of the thing, give this release another try. Especially if you little bastards are lucky enough to be blessed with an OS which actually supports all of its features. But I'm not bitter. Really.


Default Qtcurve look 'n feel


Aqua like theme called Agua.

Milky Theme