Slow Vim Menus and GTK Themes
Today I had to move my development of my latest price injector to a RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 machine (RHEL5) due to some third-party libraries that required version of libs that were present on RHEL5 but not RHEL3. No worries, I think, I have the machine, I just need to get a few things from the CentOS 5 site to complete the development tools installation, and then I'm ready to go.
I'm a Vim guy... love it. Don't even think about what I'm typing most of the time, so it's natural to put Vim on the RHEL5 box so I can edit the source. No surprise there. But what was a surprise is the fact that the menu redraw was exceptionally slow. I mean way way too slow for the machine and network I was using. Clearly, something was wrong.
So I started to investigate GTK themes a bit. Turns out, the one I was using (GTK-Step) uses bit-mapped graphics for the menus. This is a lot slower than we need. There's another called Smooth-Metal that was every bit as nice and after a few hours I was able to make it downright appealing to me, that uses a fraction of the bandwidth for the X11 GUI. The trick was having a tool to change the GTK Theme.
Enter gtk-chtheme. This is a wonderful little program that allows you to see the theme in action and then apply it to the window manager and voila! This is an important link to remember because I did a lot of searching to find something that worked as nicely as this little guy. Saved me a lot of grief.
UPDATE: gotta watch out though... the GTK Theme I like (Smooth-Metal) I've hacked up a touch to look even nicer uses the GTK Engine 'smooth' and that's not on RHEL3 - or FC3 systems. You have to get a reasonably recent build to get the 'smooth' engine. I've even tried compiling it from scratch for my RHEL3 boxes but it requires GTK 2.4+ and that is again more than is on the RHEL3 boxes and getting that on the boxes is too much because of the RPM dependencies. In short - it's too much grief for the benefit. So just be clear about what you're getting into with some of these themes.
[3/10/08] UPDATE: seems the theme engine is crucial. So I looked at the engines for FC5, RHEL3 and RHEL5 and came across the engine ThinIce. It works really well, and after about 20 mins of fiddling, I had something that looked as nice as the Smooth engine, but was working great on all the platforms I have. Now
I'm really set. Nice to get that out of the way.