How to change Motif theme in DDD and Insight to something more pleasant?

Question

I have Tk version 8.5.3 installed, theming engine support added since 8.5. Still, I don't know how to use themes, default Motif is just ugly:

Screenshot

Maximamaximal

Mentioning DDD which can also stand for DomainDrivenDesign is likely to cause confusion. Please modify the tags/title to something less ambigous. – Switchblade

I could change it to something like GNU-DDD or Data-Display-Debugger but those would be new tags, I don't have enough reputation yet to create them. – Maximamaximal

I feel like rewriting the UI part of DDD in Tk one of these days. Tk has got many things correct right out of the box. – Puffball

Answer 1

DDD is written using Motif widgets. (These are far older than any other Widget set on Linux and are predated only by the "Athena" widgets.)

As far as I know, you can’t change a “theme" for Motif. You can, however, change the colors and fonts individually. The “Ddd” resource file defines all these. In this file, you will find entries such as the default font to use for labels, etc.:

Ddd*defaultFont: helvetica-medium

or the base font size:

Ddd*FontSize: 120

or the background color:

Ddd*background: grey

There's an enormous number of resources you can customize here; again, the "Ddd" file has all the details.

You normally don't edit Ddd directly, though. Usually, you would take the appropriate resource line, customize it, and insert it into your ~/.ddd/init file. For instance, inserting

Ddd*background: red

will turn DDD into a firefighter tool. Again, the "Ddd" file has instructions.

Enjoy debugging!

Andreas

Ranket

Answer 2

From the question I take it that ddd is using Tk widgets for its GUI? The answer is that it will take quite a bit of developer effort to make the change.

The problem is that the Tk themed widgets aren't drop-in replacements for the old ones. They necessarily work differently, and far too much code out there existed that used the old widgets' fine details for critical effects for it to be possible to force an upgrade of everyone. Unhelpfully, it's typically production-grade applications that bear the brunt of this; quick scripts can upgrade easily enough since they typically only use features that are compatible, but the more effort was put into tuning the more there is to be undone.

(The other issue is that the native themes for Linux aren't really good enough yet due to messy problems with model incompatibilities and, IIRC, licensing tangles. If your development targets are Windows or OSX this shouldn't matter too much to you.)

[EDIT]: BTW, if it is genuine Motif and not Tk, then you're stuck. That widget set always looked like ass.

Kierkegaard

Answer 3

ddd is data display debuger i agree with u that the default themes is really ugly But i do not find some methods to change it looking up on this, http://www.comms.engg.susx.ac.uk/fft/programming/ddd-3.3.1/ddd-themes.html#Display%20Title%20Color

hoping it may help u

Diantha