HOWTO: Make Wine less of an eyesore (fonts and colors)

[psi42]

Wine is a wonderful piece of work, and it can do amazing things.

Unfortunately, it's pretty much the ugliest thing imaginable.

Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to make programs running in wine a bit less of an eyesore. Like a great deal of stuff in wine, these things are not very well documented, so it took some digging to find them.

Here's a screenshot of the "less ugly" wine. It's not much, but it does make it a lot easier on the eyes.


Let's get started.

First, the colors. I ran across this, which provides the color settings for a ubuntu-themed wine.

Here's how I got it to look like LighthouseBlue, the Best GTK Theme Ever (TM):

Edit ~/.wine/user.reg and add:

[Control Panel\\Colors]
"ActiveBorder"="238 238 224"
"ActiveTitle"="238 238 224"
"AppWorkSpace"="204 204 192"
"Background"="95 124 168"
"ButtonAlternativeFace"="238 238 224"
"ButtonDkShadow"="85 85 82"
"ButtonFace"="238 238 224"
"ButtonHilight"="255 255 255"
"ButtonLight"="255 255 255"
"ButtonShadow"="178 178 134"
"ButtonText"="0 0 0"
"GradientActiveTitle"="238 238 224"
"GradientInactiveTitle"="238 238 224"
"GrayText"="233 233 233"
"Hilight"="95 124 168"
"HilightText"="255 255 255"
"InactiveBorder"="238 238 224"
"InactiveTitle"="238 238 224"
"InactiveTitleText"="255 255 255"
"InfoText"="0 0 0"
"InfoWindow"="238 238 224"
"Menu"="238 238 224"
"MenuBar"="0 0 0"
"MenuHilight"="238 238 224"
"MenuText"="0 0 0"
"Scrollbar"="238 238 224"
"TitleText"="255 255 255"
"Window"="255 255 255"
"WindowFrame"="0 0 0"
"WindowText"="0 0 0"

Of course, you'll only get the colors. No GTK widget goodness, but it does look a lot better.



Now then, this stuff was really hard to find:

Edit ~/.wine/system.reg, and add:

[System\\CurrentControlSet\\Hardware Profiles\\Current\\Software\\Fonts] 
"LogPixels"=dword:00000068

This corresponds to HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\Software\Fonts\LogPixels, and is (in hex) the DPI value that Wine uses. For some reason, even with this value set correctly, the fonts are still way too small, so you may find you need to set it higher.
I set it to 0x68, which is 104 dpi. This seems to work pretty well for a 96 dpi display, but you may need to adjust it.

Edit ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/win.ini, and add:

[Desktop]
MenuFontSize=12
MessageFontSize=12
StatusFontSize=12
IconTitleSize=12

You may also need to add:

MenuFont="Bitstream Vera Sans"
MessageFont="Bitstream Vera Sans"
StatusFont="Bitstream Vera Sans"
IconTitleFaceName="Bitstream Vera Sans"

There you go. That should make a lot of difference. I still can't figure out how to get wine to use my themed cursor though...


~psi42