Baghira Help

General Design

Default Style

Baghira allows you to run Aqua and Brush Metal designed windows side by side.
Select which one you'd prefer as the default design

Stipple Background

Check to enable the "Scanline" Look of OS X,
uncheck if you prefer a plain design
(This has no effect on the brushed Metal Design)

Stipple Contrast

Adjust the intensity of the Stipples compared to the background
(TFTs often need a higher contrast)

Shadow Groupboxes

Check to give the Groupboxes a sunken look
Notice that recursive groupboxes (GB in a GB) are not reshadowed.

Shadow Intensity

Adjust the darkness of the Groupbox shadow
(TFTs often need a higher contrast)

Use Bevel as Highlight Color

OSX has a nice bevel if you select some items (in listviews)... this does not really work on qt, but somehow. Just give it a try and if you choose to do not like it, deactivate it.

Button Color

Use the rgb Sliders to select a color for buttons and similar widgets
(uses the "Aquarius" coloring)

Widget Coloring

You can choose between the new Aquarius coloring function and the old style coloring (from mosfet's liquid)
If you want an Aqua like look, choose the Aquarius function

Inactive Widget Color

Choosing the Background color for the unhovered widgets should be fine.
However, if your background color doesn't match the coloring function you can select something different.

Use Rectangular Buttons

Check, if you prefer the iTunes like above the Auqa buttons.
(Applies on pushbuttons, "ok", "cancel", etc.)

Center align Tabs

Usually tabs appears on the left side of a tab section (sometimes right)
Check this to force them to be center aligned (also see BAB section)

Special Widgets

Listviews

Use flatter listview header

Check, if you want listview Header look like the center part of iTunes buttons.

Draw Tree lines

Window$ draws lines to combine the entries of a treeview - OS X does not.
If you want to draw thos lines, you may choose between solid lines (CDE like) or dotlines (Window$ like)
You may also select their color, fitting your text/background color settings.

Expanders look like

Window$ uses +/- to indicate the state of treeview entries (closed/open), OS X and CDE use directed triangles.
Select whatever you like.

Use custom Expander color

Usually the Expander is drawn in text color.
Using a more subtile color is a good idea anyway.

Kicker

Stipple on Aqua mode

You can select the scanlines for kicker independendly

Remove bevel

Good idea, if you want to use translucent Kicker or "misuse" Kicker as topscreen bar.

Use round taskbuttons

Give the taskbuttons round edges - similar to the comboboxes.
Avoid this, when using a translucent Kicker - looks crap.

Use Custom Color

Usually kicker wants to use the button color as background color - you can change this here

Scrollbars

Animate hovered sliders

Check this to indicate hovered sliders with a nice animation (rising bubbles)

Shadow Slider/Squeeze pressed slider

Old functions to indicate slider state. Not really necessary since the Animation, but you may still use them if you wish.

Progressbars

Style

You want the Apple style.
The Liquid style is an animated version of the old liquid candybar and let's rather not talk about the Baghira style... ;)

Show Value

If you want to see the so called progress percentage (what is imho just for user psycho), check this.
Leave it, if you don't think, showing some percentage makes any sense...

Toolbars

Use round Buttons

Check if you prefer the Aqua like round buttons over the iTunes like (for toolbars)
See the BAB section as well.

Show unhovered Buttons

Check, if you want to see (conjuncted) Toolbuttons, that are not hovered by the mouse.
See the BAB section as well.

Menus

Translucency

Choose your preferred mode. Solid is fastest, Gradient is slowest.
Opacity settings only hold for custom and gradient setting.

Look

• Choose if you like stipples on the menu as well (does not hold for gradient).
• Text Shadows shadows text if Text Shadows is shad... selected.
• Usually qt uses the button color for popup menus - we don't like it and therefore you can either select button, background or custom color settings here.

Effects

The QT/KDE effects do not really work with the baghira translucency engine.
DO NOT ACTIVATE THEM - NONE!
You may choose between fading in popups and several scrolling (or no effect).
The default speed (20, means 200ms) should be ok, however you can have faster or slower effects.

Shadows

The KDE shadows do not really work with the baghira translucency engine (or the kde one ;).
DO NOT ACTIVATE THEM!
You may select an individual shodow width (wider means slower).
Shadows apply to left and right side (and bottom).
You can also adjust their darkness to your screen gamma.

Custom Colors

Up

Configure Button Colors

Title Alignment

Common Settings

Individual Settings

Draw Icon

Check to display the application Icon next to the Window title.

Button Style

Select either the onsticked "Jaguar", the sunken "Panther", the pre-OS X like "Nostalgia" or the milky "Milk" (after the famous Skin by Max Rudberg) button type.

Active Titlebar Effect

You may choose between the Panther like vertical "Gradient", the Jaguar like "Stippled" look, pre OS X "Nostalgia", "Glossy" (like cobos, buttons, tabs, etc.) and "Brushed" Metal.
Combine them with the buttons as you like.

Colors

Left colors influence the 3D effect (bright and dark border lines) that allways exist on the top and around the whole window if you're using the brushed metal design, right colors the titleshadow and the comic frame.

• Gradient:
  Left to right colors define the top to down gradient look.
  The human brain will usually interpret light to dark gradients as concave and dark to light gradients as convex.
  (Apple uses concave ones)
• Stipples:
  Right color defines the color of the scanlines on a left colored ground.
• Nostalgia:
  Leftcolor defines the base, right color the structure (partial lines)
• Glossy:
  Uses only the left color, right color settings are ignored (besides general stuff above)
• Brushed:
  The brushed color allways follows the brush tint from the style.
  The color settings here have no infuence (but again on the general stuff, so it might be necessary to adjust them)

Inactive Titlebar Effect

Same as above, but holds for windows that do not have the focus.

3D Intensity

Controls how much the 3D effect creating lines differ from the left color.

Titleshadow intensity

Controls the visability of the line below the titlebar.
Set to zero to remove it (e.g. for Brushed Metal)

Round Corners

Simply check the corners you wish to be rounded.

Up

Systray

Right click the paw to get a small config dialog for bab.

Default Style

You know this option from the style config dialog.
Though it appears there as well, it's a plain BAB option.
BAB will reset the settings to this Design when it's closed, i.e. if bab is closed with kde it guarantees, that KDE starts up in this mode next time.

Aqua/Brushed Tabs are

With OS X.3, codename "Panther" Apple introduced a new Widget, the "Chooser" that is basically a Tab, but looks like a button.
QT does not provide such a Widget, but we can make Tabs look like it.
You can choose separately for Aqua and Brushed Metal designed Applications, if you wish the Tabs to appear as "Tab"s, as "Chooser"s or let baghira decide what to use by selecting "Clever".
In the latter case, Tabs on Dialog will appear as Choosers and as Tabs elsewise.
Notice that the technical property of the Application is important, not it's appereance.
Therefore e.g. knetscan (looks like a dialog, but isn't) will show tabs if you select "Clever".

Toolbuttons follow Design

If you check this, Aqua designed apps will have round, Brushed Metal designed apps iTunes like toolbuttons.
The Setting from the style config is overwritten.

Pushbuttons follow Design

Same as above but holds for the Pushbuttons (Ok, cancel, etc.),
overwrites the "Use Rectangular Buttons" setting from the style config.

Show unhovered Toolbuttons for

Finetunes and overwrites the corresponding setting from the style config.
You can choose the show (conjuncted) unhovered Toolbuttons either for the Brushed Metal, the Aqua, both or no Design.

Up

DCOP

DCOP is the KDE inter-application (inter-process, to be more precise) protocol.
It allows applications to talk to each other.
If you're developing an application and want to force it to to Brushed or Aqua look, you can use it, though this is imho not a very nice style (the decision should allways be up to the user)
The default way for end-users to acces the DCOP interface of an application is to use the dcop shell client.

Open a shell (konsole, xterm, whatever... ;), make sure BAB is running (paw in the systray?) and type
me@box:~$ dcop bab babInterface

As response you'll get something like this:

Forget about the first two functions, dcop internal stuff.

Let's try toggleState(). Type
me@box:~$ dcop bab babInterface toggleState
You will notice the paw chaged it color, indicating you just switched the mode.

Good, type
me@box:~$ dcop bab babInterface toggleState
again to switch back.

state() will return the currently used design as integer value, where
0 means Aqua
1 means Brushed Metal

setState() allows you to set the current state to a specific value, regardless what the current state is, e.g. type
me@box:~$ dcop bab babInterface setState 1
to move into Brushed Metal mode

decoState and setDecoState behave similar to this, but affect the settings of the deco state.
The used values are 0|1|2 referring the Jaguar|Panther|Brushed designs, you defined in the windeco config dialog.
Notice that even those settings are overwritten if you checked "Follow style" in the deco config

start() is for starting applications (surprise)
It takes two or three parameters

The first one is allways the command you want to execute.
If you want to submit commandline options, you'll need to quote them together with the command, so konqueror --profile webbrowsing becomes "konqueror --profile webbrowsing"
Unfortunately the starter does yet not parse escape characters, what makes it impossible to pass quotes or blanks as part of the command or one of its options, so kde application can not be executed.
I'll implement an escape character parser if there should really be demand on it.

The second argument (integer) addresses either the style or the deco settings, reason:
The function waits for the style to please read its settings before resetting the settings... :)
But... non KDE applications (basically anything that doesn't get styled by baghira) just do not read the style settings, so they won't be resetted.
Therefore do not use the three argment start function for non baghira style applications - use the two argument function instead.

The third argument (if) addresses the deco settings
The integer values are as described above.

After all that, basically
me@box:~$ dcop bab babInterface start "konqueror --profile webbrowsing --caption Safari" 1 2
will give you, what your looking for.
If you e.g. want The Gimp to appear with the jaguar deco
me@box:~$ dcop bab babInterface start gimp 0
will do that :P

Up

Up

Kicker Menu Applet

Baghira includes a patched version of the original Kicker Menu Applet.
The only difference is, that it dasplay the title of the currently active window in front of the menu.
Notice, that i have to strip this somehow out of the Window Title, what may sometimes fail, if the Application does not follow some basic Windowmanager conventions or has a complex name (i.e. consisting of two or more words...)
If you get an invalid application name, please mail me the exact window title as displayd on top of the window and the shown name
To activate it rightclick a kicker panel, say "Add" and then "Applet".
Choose "Baghira Menu".
Next, make sure qt displays the menubars outside the aplication (usually at top of the screen).
Open the KDE Control Center (kcontrol), choose "Desktop" and "Behaviour" in the "Topscreen Menubar" section, select the "like Mac OS" option.
You're done ;)

Update (KDE 3.4)

Since KDE 3.4, kicker uses a special menupanel, which is autoadded if you use top menus and loads it's menuapplet

If you want the baghira kicker applet (with the apps name) you must remove the kicker menuapplet and add the baghira one.

It resists in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kicker/applets/menuapplet.desktop

Style suggestions

• Use Aqua as default mode
• Stipple Background (for kicker as well)
• Use the Aquarius Coloring function
• Try 75/125/241 or 84/140/242 as Color
• Set inactive colro to background
• Do not use rectangular buttons
• Center align tabs
• Do not use the flatter ListviewHeader
• Do not draw treelines
• Choose the apple expanders
• Use an expander color lighter than your text color (e.g.black -> 180/180/180)
• Remove the kicker bevel
• Do not use round taskbuttons
• Use a custom kicker color, equal to your background color
• Animate sliders
• Don't use other slider effects
• Use Apple Progressbars, don't show the progress value
• Use bab to use round buttons for Aqua and iTunes Buttons for B/M design
• Use bab to display unvovered buttons for brushed mode, but not for aqua mode
• Use fade in effect and 8px sized shadows for popup menus

Deco suggestions

• Use the (new) default values for button colors
• Center align titles
• Set titleheight to 21
• Use Panther as default mode
• Define the three designs according to their name
• Set button positions to close/min/max -- menu (Buttons tab in the windeco config)

Using shell scripts

You can use shell scripts and the dcop shell client to automate style settings for baghira.
With 0.5e the whole thing became much easier for you - and more working ;) Open kwrite and start typing:

#!/bin/sh
#shell scripts do allways begin with this line
#first check if bab is running
if dcop bab; then
dcop bab babInterface start "juk --caption iTunes" 1 2
#bab not running
else
#start juk
juk --caption iTunes
#end if
fi

Baghira comes with this and more sample scripts.
Make them execuatble
me@box:~$ chmod 754 <scriptname>
and place it into a binary path.

KDE Stuff

• Try a docker, e.g. kxdocker or kooldock
• Get the kwin shadow patch (only up to kde 3.2.2) or try the new xserver from freedesktop.org
• To activate the top menu, start kcontrol, say desktop and behaviour and select the appropriate menu option
  Then start the menu applet from kicker to embed the menus into kicker

Icons

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