This repository is a maintenance fork of the original Mediterranean family of GTK2/3 themes.
The last "official" version of the suite of themes (version 2.03) was in 2013-06-20, which means that it doesn't have support for many newer versions of GTK+3 (including major releases like 3.10 or 3.12). Since GTK+3 is constantly improving (with a release cycle of major releases of 6 months), and including new widgets, the "stock" version 2.03 of the theme is unsuitable for use with newer desktops and distributions.
Unfortunately, the original author of the theme does not seem reachable via the common means and apparently has stopped working on the theme.
In fact, even if you don't use any particular desktop at all (that is, all that you use is a window manager like fluxbox), you are likely to have applications that will use GTK2/3. Examples from my experience include GNU/Emacs 24, any Qt4-based application, Firefox/Iceweasel, Chrome/Chromium, and much, much more.
Luckily (and this is the beauty of Free Software!), the original code is released under the GPLv3 license, which allows us to continue the work where it was left off, with improvements and adaptations to suit everyone better. In essence, Free Software is a "live entity".
A stock installation of GTK3 will mostly be sufficient for using this theme. On the other hand, the GTK2 part of it is heavily based on the Murrine theme engine and if you use GTK2 by any means (see above for indirecty uses of GTK2), then you will have a layout that is totally unintended by the authors.
In a Debian-based distritribution (like Ubuntu or Linux Mint), you should
install the gtk2-engines-murrine package:
apt-get install gtk2-engines-murrine
To make things easier, we expect to offer precompiled packages in an easy
way (but you can generate yours yourself from the debian branch of this
repository, if you don't want to wait).
Glad that you asked. It is an unfortunate fact that there is a scarcity of dark themes that satisfy some of my requirements (and, as it seems, the requirements of many other people who are following the project):
- Be attractive, ellegant, pleasing to the eyes.
- Be sober, so as to not distract your attention from your main work. One of the principles of good design is that it should be unobtrusive.
There is a good amount of dark themes around, but fail the requirements above being, many times, too distracting, not sober, sometimes waaay too dark or making your desktop appear more like a toy.
The healthy middle ground seems to be neglected and the Mediterranean family of themes fills (at least partially) this niche.
Yes, definitely! You can contribute in many different ways. Perhaps the most obvious one is just filing a bug report on github with a detailed description of your environment (for instance, which version of GTK3 are you using? Which desktop environment?) and what doesn't look right (screenshots are highly appreciated).
Of course, if you know how to code, then, please, by all means, lend us a hand. We are just starting to gain momentum and it would really be nice to have a world-class, ellegant theme that we should be proud of.
Sending pull requests or, better yet, reviewing the code is appreciated.
Rogério Brito.