Metacity theme on Mate Desktop

Support & Help Requests
#1

I've been running an Emerald theme for my titlebars for almost ten or more years now. As much as I've grown attached to it I'd love to be able to use a Metacity or GTK theme to get that look without the overhead of Compiz and Emerald. I located a theme like this on Mate-Look (also on Gnome-Look) but for some reason it simply does not want to apply or is broken somehow.

Could someone who knows what they're looking at please take a look at it and either tell me what I need that I can do to make it work or edit the theme so it works again? Much thanks and appreciation in advance.

#2

I figured out what's wrong, and now it works for me:

OSX-Black
OSX-Black814×590 93.6 KB

Under all the files extracted from the theme tarball, there's a file called metacity-theme-1.xml. You can see it at the bottom of the screenshot I attached; it's the highlighted file. Open that in a text editor. The top of the file should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<metacity_theme>
<info>
  <name>Humanoid-OSX-Black-ColourButtons</name>
  <author>wonkoWonka</author>
  <copyright>none</copyright>
  <date>June 2018</date>
  <description>Black Mac OSX, w/ Coloured buttons by Humanoid, modded by Jiiprah, and again by wonkoWonka.
  </description>
  <!-- Special thanks to the script kiddie who defaced the author and description. Your special. >
</info>

Right before the </info>, and right after the fragment special. , should be --> (to terminate the comment about "defacing", whatever that comment even means). Instead, a single > appears. Add two hyphens (--) before the >. The file should now look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<metacity_theme>
<info>
  <name>Humanoid-OSX-Black-ColourButtons</name>
  <author>wonkoWonka</author>
  <copyright>none</copyright>
  <date>June 2018</date>
  <description>Black Mac OSX, w/ Coloured buttons by Humanoid, modded by Jiiprah, and again by wonkoWonka.
  </description>
  <!-- Special thanks to the script kiddie who defaced the author and description. Your special. -->
</info>

Save the file, close your text editor, and switch your window border theme to something else and then back again to this Humanoid theme. The decorations should then appear.

I was thinking about tipping off the maintainer about the problem. But that theme contains so much legacy cruft, and it's been unmaintained for so long, I'm thinking about asking the maintainer if I can take over development.

1 Like
#3

Thank you very much for fixing this! Much appreciated.

It's not that I don't like Compiz, it's just that I seem to get fairly regular crashes whenever I use any Java apps. Everything seems to be fine until I close the application, then bam! Out goes my Compiz and my Emerald theme leaving me with apps that are confused about which virtual desktop they're on and windows without titlebars. Sadly even relaunching Compiz doesn't really help until I log out and back in again. So I'm seeking alternatives.