Hi all,

In your opinion, what feature SHOULD exist in almost every theme ?

hm, all my themes (none of which were ever really finished nor even published :D ) have/had a clock, systray and tasks, vwm, some quicklaunch shortcuts (3 or 4). the newer ones also have a winamp controls and song title displays.

i can live without the shortcuts and the clock, even without the vwm, but i will not be satisfied with the result...

imho taskbar and systray are the basics, clock is also nice thing to have - but - not the analog one - sure it looks great, but if you need fast readout then it is not quite what you want
but the most important thing is menu that gives you most efficient way of launching your programs
sure - some people put everything into quicklaunch bars or place shortcuts on desktop, but for me it looks trashy, and if someone else need to use such machine is completly lost!
if i would want to realise theme for general public i would do it such way that menu system would be easly (drag&drop for instance) configurable and flexible
adding a couple hundreds lines to menu definition file is not the right approach, not for average mr smith

Well... thanks for your answers...
hmmm... of course, a kind of systray and lsxcommand is the strict minimum a theme should offer... but I don't really want to know what kind of module should be there...
I just want to know what feature should be :)

I mean things like (IMO) easy theme management (via !popuptheme), easy wallpaper management, easy window's alpha management... and, oh, thanks gyorka, easy popup entries management. Things like that (that's all my poor imagination let me think about - that's why I'm asking you)

someone should make a popup customization utility for the text averse...

ok, so then i would say: everything that can be done via !popuptheme :)
that's the easiest way to manage things, and you don't have to search through a theme's config just to find an evar which lets you change this or that setting.

I think in order to be a shell replacement it should posess all the features (or most of them) of the shell being replaced, so it should have a tray, taskbar, clock, desktop and menus. Once you have all that the rest is gravy.

vwm, taskbar, system tray, winamp controls and display, and clock with date (even if just a mouse-over date).

vwm is mandatory for me and windows pretty much dictates a systray. I also need some kind of quicklaunch area. A traditional taskbar is a waste of real estate. I run too many programs and can't figure out which one I need to click on. So I never minimize. I just keep my progs up in different virt windows. Minimizing & maximimizing progs reminds me of a field full of prairied dogs. Pop up/ Pop down :-)