Customizing Evidence

Icons

If you built evidence with shelf and icon-view (or download evidence), you may use a ready-made icon-set of your choice.
To build your own iconset, make new folder under /usr/local/share/evidence/icons, copy the desired icons into that folder, and create a file mime.icons telling evidence which of the icons to use for which MIME-type. See other iconsets for examples for the mime.icons map.

Themes

If you built evidence with the evas-canvas, you may use a ready-made theme of your choice, or make your own using one of the shipped ones as example.

To create new background-databases for use with the ebg-loader, you will want to also download ebony.

Theme-plugins ("engines")

Themes tell evidence what fonts, pictures and theme-plugins to use.
Theme-plugins are responsible for loading or creating icons, rubber-bands, scrollbars, and background pictures.
They can do this in any way they like -- but whether you like your icon-view minimalistic or convoluted, you'll only load the plugins you actually use!
If you know the C programming language, you may write your own theme-plugins.

Backends

To run evidence with a backend other than the one-size-fits-all default, pass the backend's name on the command-line (see manual). To make it the default backend, simply ln -s /usr/local/lib/evidence/backend/MyFunkyNewBackend.so /usr/local/lib/evidence/backend/fsxs.so -- I'll auto that in the future.

Providers

Providers are plugins that provide extra info on MP3s, Oggs, images, and other files. The setup file evidence.providers tells evidence which providers to try on what type of file.

Menus

Right-clicking on a file brings up a menu with actions that can reasonably be applied to that file. How evidence knows which actions make sense for a given file depends on the backend: the default backend would read its setup file (evidence.menu); the GNOME-VFS2 backend would look it up in the GNOME's database etc.

URL-Handlers

When an URL is entered into the typebuffer ("ľshell"), evidence will look up the protocol (e.g. "http://", "ftp://") in evidence.handler to know which program should handle the URL (Mozilla, lftp, ...).

MIME-Handlers

If a program is double-clicked, it is started.
If a data file (or "document") is double-clicked, evidence will determine the document's type (e.g. "text/html", "image/gif"). It will then try to have a suitable application open that document (a text-editor for the HTML, a graphics editor for the GIF etc.).