Martin Drautzburg wrote:

> I am failing at something as simple as changing the color of Window
> Title bars. I believe it must somehow be possible so inspect a title
> bar and then "click my way backwards" until I find the right piece of
> code, i.e. the code that creates WindowTitle. I would be most grateful
> if someone could give me instructions on how to do this.


Ned already gave you the answer, but here's what you could have done to 
track down the code for this:

Yes, you can inspect the title bar of a window by bringing up the 
morphic halos on it (alt-click)... this is the right direction to go in. 
  If you alt-click once on the title bar of a Browser window (in 
3.2gamma), for example, a halo appears around the whole window which 
says "System Browser" at the bottom.  If you click again, a smaller halo 
appears around the title bar, which says "Alignment".  If you click a 
third time a smaller halo appears around a section of the title bar 
called "Rectangle".  (If you want, you can do fun stuff like tearing 
apart the title bar by using the "Pick up" (black) halo to drag the 
Alignment or Rectangle morph out of the window.)

Now, you can inspect any of these objects by clicking on the "Debug" 
halo handle on the right (with the wrench).  When the debug menu comes 
up I usually choose "explore it" as the inspector, since the explorer 
lets you dive down into the details of morphs more easily.

If you alt-click to the "Alignment" or "Rectangle" morph in the title 
bar and explore that one, you'll notice that they have an instance 
variable called "color".  You can change the value of the color variable 
in the explorer by executing a Smalltalk command in the lower pane of 
the explorer.  For example, try a do-it on "self color: Color red" and 
you'd see part of the title bar turn red!

Also, when exploring the Alignment morph, you'll see the top line of the 
explorer says something like "an AlignmentMorph(2140)".  That's the 
actual class name for this particular morph.  You can then browse the 
code for this class by selecting that line and choosing "browse 
hierarchy" from the pop-up menu.

If you browse the source code for the AlignmentMorph and RectangleMorph 
classes, you might eventually realize that these are dead-ends in terms 
of figuring out where the code is that originally sets the title bar 
color.  These are just basic classes for grouping (aligning) morphs 
together and drawing rectangle shapes.

What you really want is the morph for the whole window, the first halo 
that came up, that was labeled "System Browser".  In the explorer, 
you'll see the class for this is SystemWindow.  If you browse the 
SystemWindow class, you'll see methods such as #addCloseBox, 
#addExpandBox, etc. (which would appear to refer to the titlebar 
widgets), so this is more promising.

SystemWindow is a fairly large class, though, so finding the right 
method in there is a little tricky.  You could start looking by hand 
through all methods that have to do with initialization (starting with 
#initialize), or with setting up the title bar (apparently called the 
labelArea if you look through the methods).

If you didn't find it right away, you might try putting a breakpoint (a 
"self halt") in one of the initialization methods that you know will be 
executed when a window is opened.  Then you could open a window and step 
through the initialization code as it is being run.  While stepping 
through, you could watch the "submorphs" or "labelArea" instance 
variables of the window to see when they are initialized, and if/when 
they change color.

(Of course, there is a big problem with putting a "self halt" in window 
initialization code, because when it tries to bring up the debugger 
window, it will hit the halt again!  Then you're in a bad state, and the 
"Emergency Evaluator" comes up.  What you'll really need to use is "self 
doOnlyOnce: [self halt]" to make sure the halt only happens once.  See 
the "Emergency Evaluator" or "Debugger" swiki pages, or the page about 
crashing/freezing on the Squeak FAQ, for more details on how to do this.)


> Also:
> 
> Neither the MVC nor the morphic UI are currenlty "themable", right ?
> All alternative looks work by hacking the system as such, and cannot
> coexist, true ?


Mostly true.  But someone did create a Themes/Skins package awhile ago 
for Squeak (2.8 maybe?) which does let you do this.  It was rather 
large, though, so it probably wasn't really practical to incorporate in 
the standard release.  This package may or may not work with 3.2, I'm 
not sure.  Look on the Screenshots page of the swiki for it, or do a 
search (for "theme" or "skin") on the swiki.

By the way, there is a Recipes page on the swiki, too, which would be 
good to look at.  Perhaps this message could be added as a recipe.

- Doug Way
   dway at riskmetrics.com