Style Management

The Style Manager enables users to customize their desktop using a GUI. Users are shielded from advanced concepts, such as X resources, for most common customization options. Style Manager provides controls for desktop-wide properties that adjust backdrops, keyboard settings, mouse settings, screen saver options, window management, and session management. These properties either do not affect applications directly or indirectly affect them through the X server or window manager.

You, as an application developer, are more directly influenced by font choices, color choices, and input device mappings. The Motif toolkit and the Common Desktop Environment handle many of these settings transparently for widgets. However, your application will appear more integrated with the rest of the desktop if it responds to user font and color preferences. Applications that directly interact with the mouse will feel more integrated with the rest of the desktop if they are consistent with other applications; for example, by using the same mouse button double-click minimum interval value (multiClickTime resource).

To accommodate differences between platform vendor's display technology and available font sets, the Common Desktop Environment defines font aliases that are indirect names to actual font names. Use these aliases in the same way as the rest of desktop uses them.

The Style Manager provides the user with color selection options to adjust the desktop color scheme. This color information is private to the Common Desktop Environment. Applications doing widget subclassing can indirectly access some of the color scheme by looking at inherited background pixel values. A call to XmGetColors() generates 3-D shadow colors.

The Common Desktop Environment does not dictate color usage for static colors, such as those used within icons. For these situations, however, your application should attempt to use the colors offered by the Common Desktop Environment Icon Editor, to enhance color sharing.