Hello everybody,

I think more than cursor themes or side/top and bottom panels what really forms the appearance of a DE is its window decorations. Now there are quite some nice decorations available and right away downloadable, ready to use. This is ok. But there's always the case where you want, let's say, the color from one theme, the buttons from another, and the borders and shadows totally different. This is where some people might want to make their own theme. (Me for example.)

I understand that the way to do so in the past was to properly generate a theme for aurorae, the window decorator written by Martin. For this one can turn to the documentation he wrote for this very intention. Now here's the thing. Aurorae is told to be rather outdated (as often stated by Martin himself!) and feels frustratingly uncontrollable. Even reading through the whole documentation and paying VERY close attention to every detail, every SVG #ID, every pixel, grids, paddings and shadows in the themerc config, it is completely unclear to me how to get absolute control of every pixel. For example there's the mentioned frame svgs for decoration-maximized and innerborder which just plain won't work. (Yes I have read that the former only uses center and the latter should have a transparent center respectively). There's text-shadow options in the config which just plain won't work. There's links to Aurorae Designer which hasn't been touched by Martin for years and is dead linked. There's no documentation about how big/small the drawn border elements (excluding shadows) can/shall/must be etc. etc.
It's easy and quick to set up a very well made decoration.svg in Inkscape but I'm already wasting days trying to figure out how to not get weird semi-transparent blur-borders which don't fit my measures, a title that doesn't even expand the whole window despite having the paddings from the svg etc. etc. (Really quite some annoying issues here)
The fact that the documentation written by Martin is almost the only available resources on this topic even after really digging into Google doesn't help at all.

Well this is where I tell myself that it wouldn't hurt to write a theme in QML (I write CSS and Javascript daily). Martin has blogged about it almost 5 years ago already! But there seems to be absolutely no easily accessible resource on how to do a simple window decoration for Aurorae with QML. I was like "All right, copy/paste/modify, right?" but I'm apparently not the only one having nowhere to start with since any theme I downloaded yet was drawn with SVG. I thought "All right, let's dig into /usr/share and have a look for the breeze and plastik decorations, but they are so well integrated that it's really unfriendly to begin with.

I would love if somebody could provide some more documentation information here, especially on the QML part and how to get started with it only for a simple window decoration theme.