Practical Programming, 2nd Edition

Customizing the Visual Style

Every windowing system has its own look and feel—square or rounded corners, particular colors, and so on. In this section, we’ll see how to change the appearance of GUI widgets to make applications look more distinctive.

A note of caution before we begin: the default styles of some windowing systems have been chosen by experts trained in graphic design and human-computer interaction. The odds are that any radical changes on your part will make things worse, not better. In particular, be careful about color (several percent of the male population has some degree of color blindness) and font size (many people, particularly the elderly, cannot read small text).

Changing Fonts

Let’s start by changing the size, weight, ...