I've been a Linux user for over 10 years. Back in 2008, when I was using Ubuntu (and GNOME), a series of themes came out that I just absolutely fell in love with known as Shiki-Colors. However, nobody knows for sure just what has happened to the creator of those themes, as he hasn't posted anything at all since 2009 or 2010 or so. Moreover, with GTK3 having come out in 2011, his GTK themes seem to have fallen by the wayside in the usability department, since they came out before GTK3 did.
If you've missed those themes like I have, I just did something to fill that void: I have taken CobiBird, the default theme in LXLE, and reworked it to make not only a GTK2/3-compatible remake of Shiki-Colors, but I've also done some other variations on it, as follows:
A light style (all light colors, other than a jet-black panel, which can be commented out in the gtkrc file if desired)
A mixed style, which is pretty much what CobiBird is, with the only difference being that the menu highlight color is the selected_bg_color instead of black
A NeoShiki style, which is the Shiki-Colors remake
An obsidian style, which is a dark version, albeit with a white base and dark text
A PitchDark style, which is a true dark version.
Moreover, all five of the above styles are available in all seven of the official Shiki-Colors color schemes, making 35 themes in all. Since that's quite a number of themes to be creating at once, I have made them available with the names of the themes in your theme lists being by color (example: LX-Brave-Light) or by style (example: LX-Light-Brave), with the contents of both packs being identical.
I also got to wondering the other day if it was possible to assign certain colors only to certain titlebar buttons in Openbox, especially since I seldom if ever see that done with Openbox themes. Well, I Googled it, and sure enough, yes indeed, this is possible, and so I've also done that with the included Openbox themes with these themes (NOTE: The NeoShiki and Obsidian themes use the corresponding PitchDark Openbox theme, since all three of those styles have dark titlebars and dark menus).
These themes are, of course, designed to be used with the GNOME-Colors series of icon themes, which can be downloaded from the repositories (sudo apt-get install gnome-colors).
Oh cool, I stumbled on these a day or so ago and wanted to get in touch with you about these amazing themes. I want to include them. As soon as possible. If ok with you. Great work.
Of course, go for it! :-) In fact, I would be honored if you did. BTW, these are all based on CobiBird, which I found to be one of the easiest themes to modify to create all the style variations (light, mixed, neoshiki, and so on).
they are just too good not too include to be perfectly honest and considering our default cobibird its a perfect fit. Happy to include them, will remain a sticky in the forums.
OK, settled on a new default for LXLE, thinking LX-Brave-Mixed for both widget and window border theme. Fits well, adds polish and features, no extra weight. Simply excellent.
It's good to note when using these themes, it's better to put them in your /usr/share/themes directory, which will require root access, because applications requiring passwords such as synaptic will then also use the new theme.