[mcclim-devel] Skinning McCLIM interfaces

[Andy Hefner]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 1:01 PM, Ram Vedam<rvedam at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was curious if there is a possibility that McCLIM user interfaces can be
> skinned (change visual appearance) to look more "modern"? I haven't seen too
> much written on this topic and am wondering if it can currently be done, and
> if so, how?

There's no out of the box solution for doing skinning (whatever that
would entail - some kind of pixmap theme engine, I guess), although I
think it's a fine idea.. provided you hire a professional graphic
designer to create the skin ;). If you want to experiment with this,
you can subclass the gadgets you're using and define new
handle-repaint methods to change how they draw themselves (look at
mcclim/gadgets.lisp and mcclim/Looks/pixie.lisp to see how this is
done), or go a little further and define a frame manager to make your
gadget subclasses the default choices.

Ideally, the gadget repaint functions ought to be refactored someday
into separate background and foreground/label pieces with a style
parameter, so that it's easier to customize them without duplicating
code.