In computing, a theme is a preset package containing graphical appearance details, used to customise the look and feel of (typically) an operating system, widget set or window manager. Look and feel refers to design aspects of a graphical user interface - in terms of both colours, shapes, layout, typefaces, etc (the look); and, the behaviour of dynamic elements such as buttons, boxes, and menus (the feel). It is used in reference to both software and websites. ... On Microsoft Windows 95, 98, and ME you can enter the Windows device manager by clicking Start, Settings, Control Panel, System icon, and clicking on the Device Manager tab. ...

Graphics themes for individual applications are often referred to as skins, and the words may be equivalent. In computing, skins and themes are custom graphical appearances (GUIs) that can be applied to certain software and websites in order to suit the different tastes of different users. ...

Better than having specific settings?

Themes are often used to change the appearance of a wide range of things at once, which makes them much more granular than allowing the user to set each option individually. For example, you might want the window-borders from a particular theme, but installing it would also alter your desktop background.

One method for dealing with this is to allow the user to select which parts of the theme they want to load, for example in Windows98, you could load the background and screensaver from a theme, but leave your icons and sounds untouched.

Themed systems

• Windows 98 and above came with themes such as "nature", "space", etc. which contained desktop backgrounds, icons, sounds, colors, and cursors
• GNOME and KDE use two orthogonal sets of themes: one to alter the appearance of buttons, scrollbars, list elements, (for example to specify glassy-effect pushbuttons or square ones), and another theme to customise the appearance of windows (for example, window borders and title bars).
• WindowMaker can store colours for icons, menus, and window-borders in a theme, but this is independant of the wallpaper settings (and WindowMaker has no taskbar to customise)
• IceWM uses themes to customise its taskbar, window borders, and time format
• Theme Manager applies collections of skins to the other components of Object Desktop, as well as for other popular skinnable Windows applications like Winamp