Add main/dawn variants for gnome shell

[mvllow]

#20 added moon variant support for gnome shell. As mentioned in that PR, it shouldn't be too difficult to use our build tool to add support for the other two variants :)

Happy to help with any questions if someone takes this on!

[zoedsoupe]

hmmm I would like to try that!

[mvllow]

Lovely! I think our kitty theme might be the simplest real-world example using the build tool.

[zoedsoupe]

perfect! I'll take a look

[ashbork]

I've returned to Linux and I think I can spin something up! The old Moon version sadly doesn't work anymore, but it was due to a fragile implementation on my part.

Building seems a bit tricky to automate in the long run; I'm basically building all of gnome-shell with a different stylesheet and using the resulting gnome-shell.css - hope there's a better way but I mostly fiddled with the colors to make sure they're correct. I'm also a bit opinionated on the accent color but it's trivial to change if we decide to go with another.

Here's a POC with my beloved Moon variant (and GTK3 + GTK4 themes applied). I used Gradience for this one and I'd argue for looking into changing it a bit; the top bar color seems inconsistent (not sure if it's across GTK versions, but I think that may be the case) and I don't quite agree with replacing the Close button with a big red dot.

fullscreen example, showcasing GTK3, GTK4 and the shell.

GNOME Files' header blends perfectly into the topbar, while VSCode's doesn't.

[mvllow]

That's looking great! As far as building, would gnome-shell-extensions help? Looks like it allows setting a user theme from a directory which could remove the need to rebuild gnome shell each time. I'm not well-versed in this realm

Edit: user-theme extensions: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell-extensions/-/tree/main/extensions/user-theme?ref_type=heads

[ashbork]

Applying the theme isn't an issue exactly because we can use the User theme extension, actually building the theme is tricky; what's the project's policy on the theme sources? The resulting gnome-shell.css is actually compiled out of a huge directory of parts from the gnome-shell project, should we include it in the repo with instructions to build it and add the resulting files to a release or should we have just the results?

[mvllow]

Oh that makes sense. Licensing doesn't seem to be an issue as far as including any or all of gnome-shell's css. For contributors it is best to allow building from source—I assume only including the result would make any modifications more difficult.

Edit: I do like the idea of having prebuilt releases though :)

[ashbork]

I think the way to go should be Gradience + icons + gnome-shell, in which case I'd like to have the release be a tarball that you'd just extract in your home directory. Gradience really seems to be the future for GTK theming and the old GTK4 theme I wrote probably won't be as future-proof. We could also opt for an install script that'd allow the user to pick whether they'd like to use Gradience or the legacy stylesheets