One step too far...

Well, I'm very happy that my style finally got so well. It's finished but the perfectionist in me can't let it go until the last visual glitches are fixed.

One glitch I'm sure that I can't let go happens on the arrow buttons that appears when there isn't enough room for the tabs. What happens is that those fracking arrow buttons erase a part of the tab panel. With the absolutely square button of the CDE style you can't see it but with the smooth rounded buttons of my style, it's... irritating. 4 pixels are obviously missing.

I managed to recognize these buttons amongst the jungle of things my style must handle. That enabled me to put arrows on them, even with the right colors. That's quite an exploit that forced me to dig deep in Qt/KDE sources to find what widget is actually used --FYI, it's a toolbutton.-- and with what flags. But that's not enough. I haven't found (yet) the way to know if theses buttons are on a top or bottom tab bar... and that's very anoying when you want to re-draw the tab panel of which the position depends on that very information. Right now, my style handles this issue only when the tabs are on top position but that also means a twice ugly glitch when the tabs are below the panel. (And I prefer not to think of the vertical tabs of Qt 4!) What I need is something that will fit with both top and bottom tabs. I'm still waiting for the enlightenment.

Oh yeah, I was saying "one step too far". I went just one step too far when I succeeded to prevent Kate from turning the button labels to red. This hack also prevented any app from changing the color of any button label. That was definitively too much. For example, KHTML needs this feature to have buttons with colors conform to what some HTML may tell it. Well, come on! Kate also goes too far. We don't need an icon plus a change of color on the pseudo tab to show us that a file has changed. The icon is enough. So, now my style recognizes Kate and prevents it (her?) only from messing with the colors.

I did this earlier before to eat, after I realized that re-installing Java wasn't enough to enable Konqueror to cope with this fracking Blogger site. For some reason, Java wasn't installed on my system any more. All the folders are still here but they are just empty and there is also a mess of broken links. The worst is that I don't even know who or what did this. That's not me. I didn't even realized it since Firefox doesn't complain about anything nor warned me that Java wasn't available any more. Welcome to the computer twilight zone, once again!

In the mean time, --while waiting for the enlightenment about these tab-related arrow buttons-- I took my now old Powder window decoration and I transformed it to match my style. I find the result rather interesting. The buttons look like just regular buttons with the same colors, except that you can choose the mouseover color for each button. --I kept this from Powder.-- The titlebar is like a checkbox --it's selected on the active window-- and the toggle buttons --maximize, sticky or keep above/below-- also behave like checkboxes. The frame around the window looks like a panel just thicker and more rounded. It gives a really consistant look to the windows.

Now, excuse me but I have to reduce some spaces on my windec, clean up the config dialogs of both the style and the windec... And it's already tomorrow!