How to override the widget of an exposed form filter?
Ok, so after spending a day digging around the net, it seems that there are two ways to do this.

First off, for clarification, the exposed filter from the view is not a widget, at least in the Drupal sense of the word. In the traditional Drupal sense of the word, a widget is something used on an edit form or add form. Hooks like hook_field_widget_alter() and it's brethren operate on these widgets.

Just because the views-exposed-form.php.tpl has $widget as a variable, THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT A WIDGET!!!

Now that that confusion is out of the way, there are two ways to change the exposed filter.


Add a custom module and use hook_form_alter to change things about the exposed filter form. I got as far as creating a custom module (called bypass) and creating a hook to display some simple debugging info:

function bypass_form_alter(&amp;$form, &amp;$form_state, $form_id){
    dsm($form_id);
    dsm($form);
}



when I discovered the Better Exposed Filters module.


Use the Better Exposed Filters module to display the filters as checkboxes, radio buttons, etc. and style those.


Option 2 is what I'm doing now.  Hope this helps someone :)