U++ forum: Welcome to the forum

Search on this site

Search in forums

Home » Community » Coffee corner » Is it time for a dark theme?

Show: Today's Messages :: Show Polls :: Message Navigator
E-mail to friend

Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50129]

Fri, 03 August 2018 16:54

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

I think we had this conversation many times before, but is time for an official top notch pretty dark theme?

I'm a bit in the business of writing IDEs and people want dark UI skins. It is rather popular right now.

I'm just about to implement it for CodeEditor, but a dark editor skin on a light UI is weird to me.

I have this themeing API I wrote a decade ago or so and tested that it works perfectly today (congrats Mirek on not breaking Chamelon all these years), but the two skins I have are very ugly.

So if anybody knows some free/OSS skins we can legally copy, I'll be glad to implement them.

Alternative is WindowsBlinds with CodeEditor skin, but that takes over the entirety of Windows.

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50130 is a reply to message #50129]

Fri, 03 August 2018 17:23

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

https://draculatheme.com/jetbrains/
http://www.material-theme.com/

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50135 is a reply to message #50129]

Sun, 05 August 2018 17:23

mr_ped
Messages: 826
Registered: November 2005
Location: Czech Republic - Praha

Experienced Contributor

I'm using "Breeze Dark" in the OS, looks IMO quite nice (KDE5.13 in distro "neon") (it's linux of course, people are still using windows? Shocked

weird...).

Not sure about its license and can't right now quickly google the original source, but if it's part of KDE, it should be... actually did find some licensing policy rules https://community.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy = breeze icons should be LGPL3, not sure how that fits...

[Updated on: Sun, 05 August 2018 17:24]

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50138 is a reply to message #50135]

Mon, 06 August 2018 12:48

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

Let's start slow.

First, I'll try to implement https://github.com/hugoferreira/greater-monokai

Just the syntax highlighting colors to see how it looks and if I like it.

It has pink, cyan, green and orange as main colors Razz

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50139 is a reply to message #50138]

Mon, 06 August 2018 13:09

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

OK, I just discovered that there is some support for this in code editor.

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50140 is a reply to message #50129]

Mon, 06 August 2018 13:11

mr_ped
Messages: 826
Registered: November 2005
Location: Czech Republic - Praha

Experienced Contributor

Yup, there already *is* "dark" colour scheme in the IDE, but the total look of IDE is still abysmal (with some icons using transparency wrongly expecting white background only, etc...). But it is usable.

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50141 is a reply to message #50140]

Mon, 06 August 2018 14:30

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

mr_ped wrote on Mon, 06 August 2018 14:11

Yup, there already *is* "dark" colour scheme in the IDE, but the total look of IDE is still abysmal (with some icons using transparency wrongly expecting white background only, etc...). But it is usable.

In TheIDE or CodeEditor? So far I only found CodeEditor support.

Setting TheIDE to dark must be done though a third party, like WindowsBlinds or Linux theme?

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50142 is a reply to message #50141]

Mon, 06 August 2018 14:57

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

Yeah, I'm not fond of the default dark color scheme.

Here is V0.1 of Monokai:

I need to update the side bar for the dark theme too, but otherwise a decent starting point.

The block levels need to be recolored for sure.

Attachment: syn.png
(Size: 50.47KB, Downloaded 590 times)

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50143 is a reply to message #50129]

Tue, 07 August 2018 10:01

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

So I finished CodeEditor::Bar. For now it is a bit hacky.

The real question is how to continue from here.

I'm guessing I need to determine all the colors, like SColorShadow and SColorPaper. Based on colors from the syntax highlight? Tweak them around until most of the GUI looks decent? Things like backrounds and lists and ArrayCtrl.

I probably need to tweak colors like Red and Blue too. Some shades looks good on white and really bad on very dark gray and the other way around.

Then as a last step is to create control skins.

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50166 is a reply to message #50129]

Fri, 10 August 2018 17:37

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

I'm progressing nicely, doing stuff in my offtime, but I have hit a problem: the RichTextCtrl used by annotation_popup. I'm setting the Background and TextColor and it looks nice, but I'm also setting the content of it with QTF and coloring some words.

These colors are ignored. I'm using a standard qtf sample:
qtf = "[@4 Green text] [$(255.220.200) Pink background]";

Touching TextColor or even some fields like SColorText_Write will make QTF ignore colors.

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50177 is a reply to message #50166]

Thu, 16 August 2018 09:35

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

OK, somehow I ruined QTF color display.

Even installed a fresh U++...

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50178 is a reply to message #50177]

Thu, 16 August 2018 09:42

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

cbpporter wrote on Thu, 16 August 2018 10:35

OK, somehow I ruined QTF color display.

Even installed a fresh U++...

Ha, found it!

annotation_popup.TextColor(HighlightSetup::hl_style[HighlightSetup::INK_NORMAL].color);

Setting text color overrides both foreground and background colors.

Report message to a moderator

Re: Is it time for a dark theme? [message #50179 is a reply to message #50178]

Thu, 16 August 2018 10:11

cbpporter
Messages: 1427
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

Using:

SColorPaper_Write(Color(51, 51, 51));

to set the paper color to dark gray causes QTF to not be displayed correctly. This looks to be intentional:

void  RichTextView::Paint(Draw& w)
{
        ...
	Color c = SColorPaper();
	if(Grayscale(c) < 100)
		pi.coloroverride = true;
        ...
}

This kills qtf RichTextView color display.

So I need some input on this issue.

Setting colors can only get you so far and you need to skin the GUI with chameleon.

So we need to set both and still U++ needs to be made aware if the theme is dark or light.

For some elements it is enough to set colors and chameleon. For some others, they need to know if the theme is dark or light. Like EditorBar. To select dark or light icons. Additionally, both CodeEditor and EditorBar might need and override. You may want a normal GUI with a dark editor.

So there should be a global default that each control can override? In practice only super advanced text based controls will need overrides, like CodeEditor?

Report message to a moderator

Previous Topic:	WebWord - Turtle reference example issue
Next Topic:	Windows 10 and UAC problem

Goto Forum:

-=] Back to Top [=-

[ Syndicate this forum (XML) ] [

] [

]

Current Time: Fri May 09 12:13:01 CEST 2025

Total time taken to generate the page: 0.02290 seconds