Mac Themes Garden
damien.zone216 points by speckx 2 days ago
216 points by speckx 2 days ago
It blows my mind how diverse these are, and how diverse their creators were. One single artist, Martha Royer, made over two hundred themes: https://macthemes.garden/authors/martha-royer/ (They're not all amazing in quality, but the sheer industriousness is staggering.)
I was lurking around the equivalent Windows community in roughly the same era (well, a couple of years later) and it was nothing like this. Far fewer people had the patience for WindowBlinds (the Kaleidoscope equivalent) or deep OS modding, and they tended to all be the same few types of person with more-or-less the same tastes—mostly the kind of guy who thought that an RGB fan in a brushed aluminum tower PC was the height of self-expression. (Basic Windows Plus themes were way more primitive than what was possible with the right tools.) It's astonishing to see what looks like the entirety of the pre-dot-com-crash web's wonderful, weird diversity reproduced in perfect miniature over in the Mac space.
Although I keep scrolling, and I haven't found a legit NeXT theme yet. There are a few that get close but nothing with the actual UI assets. Maybe this is an opportunity...
EDIT: For those curious, here's roughly what themes on OS X looked like in the 2000s: https://macgui.com/downloads/?cat_id=10
Self follow-up: https://macthemes.garden/themes/aa2e2f4e6f87-openstep-4/ and https://macthemes.garden/themes/168f21725acd-nextstep-4/ appear to actually have the correct assets for a NeXT look. Scott Naness seems to have been a cut above the rest for authenticity—there's also OS/2 Warp 4 and even vintage Windows 2.0 skins in his library.
Also, special mentions for obscure GUI clones:
- Xerox Star: https://macthemes.garden/themes/ede837fa5df1-xerox-star/
- QNX: https://macthemes.garden/themes/c46eae6cd818-mac-qnx/
- Solaris CDE: https://macthemes.garden/themes/8ba34a581676-macsolaris/
- the classic X Athena widgets: https://macthemes.garden/themes/533452549350-xlook-athenaxlo...
- Rhapsody, because obviously: https://macthemes.garden/themes/b0c635d1faf0-rhapsody-k2/
Though they were a step down from Kaleidoscope schemes and appearance manager themes in terms of what they could do, those early OS X themes remain some of the nicest looking, highest fidelity themes on any platform. In particular, those made by Max Rudberg[0] hold a special place in my heart.
Modern theming systems have high DPI support which is in theory an upgrade, but the desktop appearance zeitgeist has skewed so flat and dull that the extra pixels make no material difference.
> the desktop appearance zeitgeist has skewed so flat and dull that the extra pixels make no material difference
Yeah, this is definitely one of the saddest things about modern UI fashion. We have the highest-resolution, highest-DPI, cleanest-looking extra-bright, extra-deep-black HDR OLED screens, and... we've got flatter UI than ever, UI that would've looked dull even on a 90s CRT.
Yes, but we have layers over layeers of abstraction, tiny scrollbars (who needs scrollbars when you could scroll with the mouse wheel, if it worked - Microsoft is still not able to get mouse scrolling right) and rounded windows.
I used Siro for years in that era, great looking theme. IMO it was cleaner than the official theme, since this was Apple’s “brushed metal” era when someone decided that the Finder should literally embody a filing cabinet.
(Mac Themes Garden author here) Yes, Martha Royer is the one name I kept seeing when recording the themes (and I'm not fully done yet!) and the diversity of her creations was stunning to see. If I remember what I read from README files she left in her archives correctly, she made over 300 of these! (Website currently has ~200, hopefully by EOY I'll be done recording everything).
There are quite a few NeXT-inspired ones but I can't judge if they use the actual assets or not https://macthemes.garden/search/?q=next&page=1
Doing a bit more research on Martha—she was a lecturer at Florida International University.
Wayback of her themes page, which repeats the 300+ number and says they're only available on CD-ROM now (as of 2006): https://web.archive.org/web/20060502073323/http://www.gate.n...
Rate My Professor page (last review in 2011, seems a bit less enthusiastic than the earlier ones): https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/professor/554604
FIU Math & Stats Dept. lists her as retired faculty: https://case.fiu.edu/mathstat/directory/retired-faculty/
Perhaps you might consider reaching out to her and asking her for an updated collection. :)
As for my obsession with NeXT themes, I think I'll stick with Scott Naness's work, although Leo Prieto's checkbox and radio button are definitely more authentic. (The original controls are simply too large to fit in the available space, but Scott is the only one to get the window frames right.)
In the 00s, I remember leaning on LiteStep and Stardock (I think?) for theming rather than anything specific to windows
Those days were pretty cool. I think that whole scene is pretty much dead for Windows now? Not a shell replacement, but I guess rainmeter is still going it looks like? But not sure if any of the shell replacements are still around or even a possibility/thing for W11 these days...
I remember trying to make my own on Windows XP. If I remember correctly, the theme files could be opened with an application which extracted resources from .exe and .dll files.
Back in the day, Kaleidoscope schemes and later appearance manager themes were one of my favorite things about owning a computer. Combined with Classic Mac OS extensions it seemed like there was nothing you couldn’t do when it came to customization. Even modern desktop Linux, as vaunted as it is for its customizability, struggles to compare.
Now of course Classic Mac OS was a security nightmare but I wish that a modern OS would try to replicate that incredible level of flexibility in a more secure manner. Will it be difficult? Sure, but I don’t think it’s impossible. I believe that something resembling the “app extension” architecture employed by modern macOS which runs extensions as sandboxed processes which are given access to special APIs would be a good starting point.
CWM + window search + keybindings was and it's still superior to whatever theme you are trying to apply. I have a patched Zukitre GTK2-3-4 theme with custom ~/.Xdefaults. I nearly don't need neither decorations nor a taskbar. Just hit win+w, begin typing, your window it's there. Magic. I don't even need to use a mouse.
OTOH, yes, Gnome's blandnes sucks a lot. With Plasma and a bit less, XFCE, you can do far more with a desktop, even Budgie it's far better than Gnome3.
And I miss tons of GTK2 themes from its era. Bluecurve looked better than everything from today. OSX, Windows, Haiku, whatever. That theme looked colourful, positive and extremely usable, with proper and visible menues, buttons, scrollbars and so. Nowaday both OSX, GTK4 with Adwaita (far less with Zukitre) and Windows are a nightmare on usability.
Once you disable the overlay scrollbars under GTK4 and force the GTK theme to Zukitre (once installed) at /etc/profile.d/gtk.sh (a line with 'export GTK_THEME=Zukitre'), most of the dumb choices from Red Hat/FreeDesktop go away for the average Joe user.
Zukitre has gray widgets (not full white, damn UI pseudo-designers), usable buttons and proper scrollbars (again, disable the overlay settings for GTK). And, for sure, COLOR CONTRAST, damn it.
Mac System 7 did it fine; so did Platinum under Mac OS 8-9. Neutral gray colors, usable widgets. Ditto with OSX, but the stripped bars sucked at first, yet Tiger and Snow Leopard look perfectly usable. The same with Windows 95, even Windows XP and partially 7. Windows 10 is unusable with flat widgets with no contrasts and hints for Windows. Windows 11 it's even worse. Current MacOS, with the same overlay scrollbars and lack of contrast it's a huge downgrade from Snow Leopard.
Even the old Motif/FVWM under Unix had a nightmarish usability for the non-CS student, but it had 3D widgets on Motif/Athena (Xaw3D) and grabable window borders. Go try resizing a window under Gnome3 or Windows 10. Or moving a window at a quick glance.
UI designers should stop following trends and just give up on merging tablets and desktops. It doesn't work.
I miss the times, across all platforms, when you could just pick an accent color or two for things like window borders, filled radio buttons and so on. On GTK you could take someone's window theme, someone else's widget theme, and go "that, but in orange".
You could even, if it didn't come by default already, have the active title bar in a different color.
Maybe 99% of people didn't use this. Maybe they hired an authoritarian at GNOME to make the adwaita "one theme to rule them all". But it used to feel like I the style choices for my own computer's gui belonged more to me as a user.
Often, that meant picking a theme that I liked, from the very active theme-design community (the garden lists more than 3000 themes, although I'm not a mac person) and then just tweaking a color here or there.
It was the same thing with MySpace vs Facebook. Removing user customization may be better for... I don't even know what reason, but it has made all tech feel just a little bit more sterile.
We now praise dark mode as some big achievement, but... we -had- dark mode, before. The Mac Themes Garden has countless "dark mode" themes.
KDE still does this quite well
Better than Gnome, but that's not a high standard. It's a mess, but KDE at least wants to improve things, with the ‘Union’ project — https://quantumproductions.info/articles/2025-02/moving-kdes...
I remember theming my mac and windows machines as a kid! Somehow all we're left with is corporate sponsored blandness and a user base who does not care about having fun with what they own, they just want a basic tool to browse the web. (and I guess ownership is much more muddied now anyway)
I think what you say is partly true—systems are definitely more locked down nowadays and we mostly just accept what corporations give us. But I think this is also, at least in part, consumer-driven. Computers are less of a novelty nowadays, so fewer people are interested in tweaking and configuring for the sake of it, while more are just looking to get work done.
Actually, I would take this a step further.
I took my old white polycarbonate MacBook to the Apple store a few years back to get a new battery. I had a few people ask me about it, and even one lady asked at the genius bar whether she could get a MacBook in a colour. People pick aluminium chassis because the alternative is cheap gray, fake metal chassis. I miss the era of colourful iMacs and I think other people do too, and not just geeks.
> But I think this is also, at least in part, consumer-driven.
I can't disagree more.
Consumers haven't requested this, and up until this ability was taken away people did theme their XP, etc.
There weren't many options without hacking but changing the XP blue bar to silver or green regularly happened. People are just taught to accept that this is how it is now though.
Back then you could only change the colors, but the decorations stayed the same. You had to use third party tools to make real changes. That's still true today, although the colors you can change on your own are much more limited. The difference is that these theming communities are much less active, and that's probably because nearly everything lives in the browser.
I miss this era so much.
> Turns out this action didn't have a keyboard shortcut until Mac OS X? Didn't know that!
Edit your Finder and/or System with ResEdit and you can add or change any keyboard shortcuts you want.
(author of the blog post here) Oh! I didn't know that, do you have guidance on that (i.e: what specific resource types needs editing in ResEdit)? I wouldn't mind getting rid of QuicKeys and going with a native solution haha.
Here you go – I took a look on a Mac OS 9 VM, and the System suitcase is what you want; MENU resources; resource ID -16489 on here but expect that to vary by version. Select the menu item you want and you can set a “CMD Key” in the bottom right corner https://i.imgur.com/wcqQ27j.png
Don't do this on the running System suitcase. ResEdit will warn you about this too. Make a backup copy, make your changes to the backup copy, then boot from some other blessed System Folder (install CD is fine) and swap them out.
The mindset where you can edit anything on everything is what we truly lost when we lost the Classic Mac OS. These themes are merely one embodiment of that mindset. It's just Resources all the way down; Any user-facing String, any UI graphics, any icons, any cursors, any sounds, any menus, any window definitions, any dialogs. ResEdit can even be extended to support editing custom (non-Apple) Resource types, to say nothing of the more powerful third-party Resource editors like Resourcerer.
Applications' code even lived in `CODE` resources in the original 68k days before the era of PowerPC and Code Fragment Manager moved that stuff to the Data Fork. A classic 68k-only Application would be a 0-byte file if one copied it to a PC improperly and discarded the Resource Fork. It's literally all Resources and that's so cool!
Here's Apple's ResEdit Reference if you need it: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...
Relevant Folklore: https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model.html
Relevant Inside Macintosh: https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/pdf/Inside_Macintosh_Volum... (warning: massive PDF)
I highly highly recommend you and anybody else interested in Classic Mac OS spend some time with David Pogue's excellent Macworld Mac Secrets 5th Edition: https://archive.org/details/mac_Macworld_Mac_Secrets_5th_Edi... (there's a 6th edition that covers early Mac OS X topics, but that just muddies the water)
edit: and keep your unmodified System suitcase backup somewhere besides the System Folder to ensure the Startup Disk control panel can't “bless” the unmodified one instead of the edited one. You can tell which suitcase is “blessed” because it will have the “Picasso” Mac OS face laid on top of the regular suitcase icon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_folder#Location_and_%22...
I'd totally pay to have these (especially a good vanilla Mac OS 8/9 theme) in a usable from on a Linux box today. I liked them then, and I'd still like to have them now. Anyone want to make one that works on Plasma/GTK and take my money?
A guy on reddit was working on one named PrismWM but he went AWOL. There was a mac os 9 lookandfeel in JDK 1.1 that could be updated to a modern version of Java as well.
I would do anything to have Monkey Paradise on my current computer.
Incredibly I was thinking the exact same thing.
Computers used to fun! I miss the candy iMac theming.
Probably would have to be a passion project. I don't think there's a large enough market for it. Maybe someone should contact the Apple UI team to import these old themes?
Such a blast from the past. Had so much fun with these back in the day, along with Winamp themes. I can't tell if I've aged or tech has aged such that this kind of thing isn't really around any more. Probably both.
I miss the days of Kaleidoscope. I even created a couple of themes myself; the one I'm proudest of is Crayon OS: https://macthemes.garden/themes/a83c1d81e770-crayon-os/
There was one theme, which had a feature which I _really_ wish had become a standard --- the title bar collapsing down to the size of the text when "window-shaded" by double-clicking --- I never liked that feature until that theme came along, and it is about the only thing about Mac OS 9 and earlier that I miss.
I miss dragging a window to the bottom of the screen so that it became a tab, and then clicking the tab would restore the window back into the Finder frame. I don't use GUI windows like I used to in Classic OS. I now barrel my way around with CLI, and then 'open .' when arriving at the destination. So would I still use that tab feature today if available? Probably, not, and that's probably why it's no longer a thing even if other people that wouldn't use it have different reasons for not.
Isn't that much like minimizing a window to the Dock?
maybe if you squint while tilting your head as you look at it. tabs could be moved around and rearranged. minimizing to the dock has zero control
Also, you could read the window’s title without hovering it. And they would persist across restart, AFAIR.
Good memories! Back in the days I used Kaleidoscope to style my PowerMac (System 7.5) to look like BeOS, but most importantly, I had an extension that gave me the column browser in the Finder that I had seen on the NeXT Cubes at university. In most courses, I was the only student who used a Mac for homework assignments.
Probably not an extension, but this app?
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1003-greg-s-browser
Greg Landweber was a huge contributor to the Mac customization scene at that time. I’d love to know more about his work, but never could find much online.
I didn't have root access to my family computer during this era, and I will forever be angry at apple for not allowing us to continue this fun until today.
EDIT: actually it looks like this is significantly older than that. I definitely didn't know enough to theme OS 9 when it was my main driver.
Kid me absolutely ran The Bug on an old PowerMac G3: https://macthemes.garden/themes/8191e1471dc9-the-bug/
I was all about Tephra! https://macthemes.garden/themes/75d29921d7bc-tephratrianon/
Can these be installed on modern macs?
The short answer is, sadly, no— Apple has the modern macOS UI locked up.
The long answer is, if you're willing to disable systemwide security features, you can experiment with modifying the appearance of macOS, but to my knowledge no one has made a real attempt to in a while. Furthermore, the themes on display here fit a paradigm where the UI is a composite of bitmap images, whereas the modern macOS is largely built from vector graphics.
But if you vectorize every bitmap in an old theme, so that individual pixels of color are converted to vector graphic rectangles; if you learn how modern macOS builds its appearance; if you make a robust solution and thoroughly test it, so that it will work 100% of the time with every app ever; if you do _all_ of that, you will still be unable to _share_ your creation with most Mac users, because very few of us would disable systemwide security for the sake of running a third party system enhancement.
That's one of the major contributors to the success of Mac OS 9 theming: third party system extensions were commonplace, they were the backbone of the ecosystem, and Apple had no mechanism for preventing their use.
I should have mentioned a couple other things:
1. Kaleidoscope (the most common OS 9 theme system extension) runs fine under emulation, so if you just want to _enjoy_ these themes, your best bet is the SheepShaver emulator (in my opinion).
2. Nothing's stopping us from creating an alternative desktop environment for the Mac, such as XQuartz. And then you can build theme support on top of something like that. But most applications wouldn't use that desktop environment for their own UI.
> Nothing's stopping us from creating an alternative desktop environment for the Mac, such as XQuartz.
Yea but why use a mac at that point? I don't see anyone on the linux side of things making anything that acknowledges why people use macs in the first place; the entire ecosystem is built to reproduce the IBM PC (...in a unix/like environment). Particularly with its disastrous keybindings and perplexing UI decisions.
The pipeline from Windows to Linux is fairly clear. The pipeline from Mac to Linux is less evident; the dyed in the wool Mac users tend to stay that way, using Linux for work rather than a daily driver.
Queue a Mac-to-Linux user to contradict this, and there's plenty of them, but we Mac users are truly the dictionary definition of the sunk cost fallacy in more ways than one.
> The pipeline from Windows to Linux is fairly clear. The pipeline from Mac to Linux is less evident; the dyed in the wool Mac users tend to stay that way, using Linux for work rather than a daily driver.
This has been my own observation as well. Although I do have to say, System76's COSMIC DE has been the first one that is actually making me consider going to Linux full time since I've switched to Mac from it. macOS has only been continuing to annoy me more and more lately.
The problem for me is hardware. Asahi isn't there yet, and I'm not giving up my M4 Pro MBP. There's no other laptop on the market that checks all the same boxes. But for now, I've just bypassed the mac's weak points by using Aerospace, and if I'm honest with myself I don't want to give up the ecosystem integration either.
It doesn’t help matters that desktop environments that try to do things “the mac way” and don’t just mimic macOS superficially (like Pantheon/elementary) don’t exist. Everything is either Win9X-like (KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, LxQt, etc) or tablet-like (GNOME). For the most part, to a longtime Mac user switching to Linux feels like switching to a bizarre alternate universe Windows that’s built around the Linux kernel instead of the NT kernel.
Apple hardware quality is just orders of magnitude beyond what competitors do. The day this stops being true (whether because Apple slips too much, or because competitors step up in major ways - not sure which is likelier) I expect we’ll see a lot more Mac-to-Linux migrations, with the virtuous circle kind of benefits that this can bring.
> Yea but why use a mac at that point?
I ask myself that with increasing frequency. Looking at all the Linux options feels like wandering through Akihabara, but one day the macOS that remains will be so unlike the macOS I enjoyed, that I'll jump the fence.
Anyway, if someone does make a new Mac desktop environment, it'd probably be for fun more than anything. Or a Terry Davis scenario.
As others have commented: no.
There was a time, though, long ago…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity
…the brief era of “Haxies”. There was an application called ShapeShifter that allowed for Mac OS X theming.
That epoch is long gone, and I can barely even find screenshots. But it existed.
Nope.
I liked Kaleidoscope, but it got old, really quick.
Some of the themes were outstanding, but some were damn near unusable.
Themes relied on system hooks that would make modern security professionals defecate masonry. OS X got rid of all that stuff.
As a lifelong Mac geek (I work for the Computer History Museum, where I organized our Macintosh 40th Anniversary and Lisa 40th events), I just want to say love this :)
The nolstalgia is real. Thanks for your hard work!
I was so hyped for a moment when I thought that maybe this was a site for a new MacOS theme program. I miss Kaleidoscope.
Looks like they’re missing the greyscale original Mac one.
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Seems like somebody forgot to read the pamphlet[1].
1. I vehemently disagree
2. This is targeted at distro maintainers, not end users.
