Greybird 3.20.0 (to be clear: with support for Gtk+3.20) released

Finally – 5 months after the release of Gtk+3.20 – I’m happy to announce the release of the first version of Greybird supporting it.

Why has it taken so long? – you

The Widget Factory - 3.20
The Widget Factory – 3.20

may ask yourselves – and one reason was certainly me being totally busy with other things, but another one was that Ubuntu didn’t ship it in its 16.04 LTS release (which was a totally sane decision, by the way). Because of the latter it took some time before the issue of having a theme that supports Gtk+3.20 became pressing enough for me to take action.

Anyway, now it is done. (At least mostly.)

While porting the theme (in this case really: porting, not just: adding support for) I also decided to rebase it on Adwaita. Over the last releases so much stuff had piled up, so many quick fixes or patching up visual nuisances to support “the next Gtk+ release” that the theme had become an unmaintainable jungle – I frankly couldn’t have told you which line mattered anymore. While rebasing, I also went from CSS to SASS, which was the only right decision, as I’m sure now after having gone through with it. It made the code so much more maintainable and readable (kind of reminding me of the first Gtk+3 releases, when themes were still a lot leaner in terms of LOC).

So yeah, I’m pretty happy with where this has been going. There are still some rough edges (e.g. progressbars are probably not 100% greybirdy) and things I haven’t added support back for (e.g. elementary’s Granite widgets), but I think what is there now warrants an initial release as things still look consistent between Gtk+2 and Gtk+3 applications.

One final note: Greybird has recently switched to a new versioning scheme, which basically mirrors the Gtk+3 release numbers the theme works best with.

Download

https://github.com/shimmerproject/Greybird/releases/tag/v3.20.0

17 thoughts on “Greybird 3.20.0 (to be clear: with support for Gtk+3.20) released”

  1. It’s looking great on Manjaro, thanks for getting this out for us. I’d love to see blackbird for 3.20… Hint, hint!

  2. very very nice, thanks a lot Simon.
    i look for a nice icon-theme for Greybird? any hints?

  3. I’m wonder, if Greybird 3.20 works fine with Gtk+ 3.18 (I’m maintainer of Greybird theme on FreeBSD), or waiting upgrade of GNOME stack (usually Gtk+ is upgraded with GNOME stuff).

    1. Hi Olivier, no as the changes were fairly drastic it is impossible to make a theme that is backward compatible from 3.20 to 3.18. so if you want Greybird 3.20 you need to wait for Gtk+3.20 (and vice versa).

    1. It’s part of Gtk+ itself, the binary is called something like gtk-examples or gtk-widget-factory.

  4. It’s beautiful! I love this theme and that it has not fallen for the “flat design” trend, instead keeping the beautiful and practical gradients, clearly partitioned elements, shadows and other things that make themes good. Thanks for that! 🙂

  5. Hi Simon.
    gedit report this:
    gedit[2682]: Theme parsing error: gtk-contained.css:3124:55: Using one color stop with linear-gradient() is deprecated.

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