Announcing the first release of The Widget Laboratory, a Gtk theme viewer/editor. While the TWL looks like The Widget Factory, they have different purposes. TWL checks the currently viewed theme for changes and updates accordingly, which makes it primarily useful as a theme editor rather than  a showcase for themes.

TWL has several important features:

• Instantly updating theme previewing.
• Use any GtkBuilder formatted Glade file to view themes on.
• Quickly open up the selected themes folder so you can edit it however you want.
• Preview Metacity themes with Gtk themes.

Instant Updating

The Widget Laboratory checks the selected Gtk and Metacity  themes for changes and then updates the preview. This makes the workflow for editing themes a lot easier and faster with TWL, instead of making changes to the theme and then making gnome reload the theme in some awkward and slow way, you see your changes instantly and can easily tweak everything to exactly how you want it.

From this...

...to this.

Preview on Glade interface files

Create your own Glade interface files and you can use them instead of the standard preview widgets.

Quickly open the selected Gtk theme folder in your default file browser

Edit > Open Theme Folder and you can then open the gtkrc file in your preferred text editor.

View Metacity themes

You can also view any Metacity window border theme with any Gtk theme. This is useful if your Gtk theme is meant to go with a specific Metacity theme (like the Dust or New Wave themes).

Installing

The recommended way to install The Widget Laboratory is from the PPA: https://edge.launchpad.net/~freshapplepy/+archive/twl

If you are using ubuntu 9.10 this is very easy, just run sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freshapplepy/twl And then sudo apt-get install twl to install it. Or grab a deb or tarball on the downloads page.