Built-in Skins

Each subdirectory under this folder describes a built-in "skin". There are five key files in each subdirectory:

• css.txt → The CSS for the skin
• details.txt → Skin-specific settings
• footer.txt → Text of the Content Footer for each page
• header.txt → Text of the Content Header for each page
• js.txt → Javascript included in the Content Footer

To improve an existing built-in skin, simply edit the appropriate files and recompile.

To add a new skin:

1. Create a new subdirectory under skins/. (The new directory is called "skins/newskin" below but you should use a new original name, of course.)

2. Add files skins/newskin/css.txt, skins/newskin/details.txt, skins/newskin/footer.txt, skins/newskin/header.txt, and skins/newskin/js.txt. Be sure to "fossil add" these files.

3. Go to the tools/ directory and rerun "tclsh makemake.tcl". This step rebuilds the various makefiles so that they have dependencies on the skin files you just installed.

4. Edit the BuiltinSkin[] array near the top of the src/skins.c source file so that it describes and references the "newskin" skin.

5. Type "make" to rebuild.

See the custom skin documentation for more information.

Development Hints

One way to develop a new skin is to copy the baseline files (css.txt, details.txt, footer.txt, header.txt, and js.txt) into a working directory $WORKDIR then launch Fossil with a command-line option "--skin $WORKDIR". Example:

    cp -r skins/default newskin
    fossil ui --skin ./newskin

When the argument to --skin contains one or more '/' characters, the appropriate skin files are read from disk from the directory specified. So after launching fossil as shown above, you can edit the newskin/*.txt files using your favorite text editor, then press Reload on your browser to see immediate results.