Hi cbpporter,

Dark theme is enabled in Windows 10 using Settings > Colors > Choose your default app mode > Dark

Then restart TheIDE.

Best regards,

Tom

Tom1 wrote on Thu, 18 April 2019 11:30

Hi cbpporter,

Dark theme is enabled in Windows 10 using Settings > Colors > Choose your default app mode > Dark

Then restart TheIDE.

Best regards,

Tom

Thanks! I mean more like in code, how to turn on CtrlLib dark mode.

Found it in GIT: Ctrl::SetDarkThemeEnabled();

But... sweet baby Jesus, my eyes! I do not mean to be rude or anything, but those colors... That contrast... That Cyan text if you switch code editor to dark mode in TheIDE. That color scheme is completely unusable. It makes my eyes bleed. And literally hurt.

Again, not to be rude, but to avoid personal bias, I showed the theme to about 5 people and we had a good time. Except for the eye bleeding...

Not to mention that it is buggy and once I switched CodeEditor to dark mode, switching it to light mode doesn't work and restoring defaults.

I need to delete settings to get things back to normal...

We need something like SetDarkIconsEnabled which is independent on SetDarkThemeEnabled, maybe support for two color icons...

And a serious pass on the colors...

Oh, and calling Ctrl::SetDarkThemeEnabled() with Windows set to light theme causes problems both in TheIDE and test app. Calling Ctrl::ReSkin() after fixes these problems but now the theme is white.

Chameleon really needs to read and write themes once, respect what you tell it to do and have a clear point after which you can make changes that are never lost by random CtrlCore behavior.

Calling SetDarkThemeEnabled once in GUI_APP_MAIN should be enough for that application to be dark forever. Then you should be able to change ink from black to Color(51, 51, 51) and this change to be respected forever.

SetDarkThemeEnabled tells U++ that application is ready to handle the dark theme. It in fact has any meaning only in windows. If you activate that, app starts following theme setting in Windows 10.

The issues is that TheIDE CtrlCore constantly overrides your changes. In a very counter-intuitive way. Chameleon has been doing this for over a decade now. If you want to correct something, you can't easily do it. If you want to implement your own theme on top of the current dark mode? It is fairly hard. It is fairly hard to force a dark app on a light windows or the other way around. Making TheIDE do the same thing is even harder because it also constantly overrides you changes in many places. The same for code editor.

Chameleon has always been a bit hard to use and counter-intuitive.

Quote:

SetDarkThemeEnabled tells U++ that application is ready to handle the dark theme. It in fact has any meaning only in windows. If you activate that, app starts following theme setting in Windows 10.

IMHO that is a counter-intuitive and problematic design. SetDarkThemeEnabled means "Set my theme to dark": change colors and skins.

Why cant U++ detect multiple themes and be coded to religiously follow those themes. So that if you change them, I don't have to track down dozen of places to make things just work.

I would use a design where you have a Theme, all theme aware components just read from the theme, nobody can write, the theme knows if it

- use the theme (just set a pointer and force the gui to refresh)

Thats centralized model which is not extensible - that is the issue I wanted to avoid.

OK, let's go in order.

Before the dark mode support, setting dark mode in Windows didn't work. So clearly it is not a "simple" issue of applying a system theme, because most applications ignore that windows option.

So my questions are:
- how do you activate dark theme in any app once, and have it work forever? Even if Windows is in light mode. Same for light mode.

Case in point:
void Ctrl::SetSkin(void (*_skin)())

It is not clear what it does and there are 100 more ways to touch skins.

I agree that more docs and some cleanup would be nice, but the basic idea is IMO sound.

- Icons: at the very least icons must have a flag. If checked, U++ should draw them as they are. And also a way to disable all UHD and sizing shenanigans.

cbpporter wrote on Thu, 18 April 2019 20:31

- Icons: at the very least icons must have a flag. If checked, U++ should draw them as they are. And also a way to disable all UHD and sizing shenanigans.

Yeah, well, but they do.... Right-click on the icon and select "Raw".

Mirek

Sorry, "None".

Mirek

mirek wrote on Fri, 19 April 2019 14:09

Sorry, "None".

Mirek

So:
1. If I want to turn off icon inverting as a whole in a dark mode application, how do I do that? You can't invert icons too easily because inverting for dark mode requires the inversion of fades and shadows, but only slight adjustments to non fades. (sample)
2. After I turned off only icon inverting for the dark mode application, how do I detect if it is dark mode so I can change all my icons to proper dark mode variants?
2. How do I turn off invert for a single icon without changing UHD?

https://www.ultimatepp.org/forums/index.php?t=msg&th=106 59&start=0&

Yeah I'm having a real hard time figuring out what is actually taken from Windows and what is U++ convention when it comes to Chameleon, especially for dark mode.

And probably things are different on Gtk and Mac...

cbpporter wrote on Mon, 22 April 2019 16:09

Yeah I'm having a real hard time figuring out what is actually taken from Windows and what is U++ convention when it comes to Chameleon, especially for dark mode.

And probably things are different on Gtk and Mac...

Exactly.

mirek wrote on Mon, 22 April 2019 21:03

cbpporter wrote on Mon, 22 April 2019 16:09

Yeah I'm having a real hard time figuring out what is actually taken from Windows and what is U++ convention when it comes to Chameleon, especially for dark mode.

And probably things are different on Gtk and Mac...

Exactly.

Well I'm having a hard time figuring it out but you know the system.

Speaking off, I implemented live skin switching. Pretty hard to do because a lot of controls cache several values

And I'm also having this problem: I'm in dark mode, I switch to light mode once, icons are still dark. I switch a second time to (the same) light mode, icons are light. Is this the dark mode icon cacher? If yes can we force an invalidate in it with some API?

That is exactly the reason why we support setting skin on startup.

See, I guess there is a certain mismatch of expectations. For me and for U++ users I care about, skinning is not that important. I just want the app look as much integrated into host as possible, do not care much above that. And most users do not switch themes 3 times per hour.

#ifdef flagMAIN
GUI_APP_MAIN
#else
void AppMain___()
#endif
{
//	Ctrl::ShowRepaint(50);

	Logi() << UPP_FUNCTION_NAME << "(): " << SplashCtrl::GenerateVersionInfo(' ');

	Ctrl::SetUHDEnabled();
	Ctrl::SetDarkThemeEnabled();
	...snip...
	LoadSkinSetting();

	// HERE IS A CLEAR POINT WHERE I CAN CHANGE THE SKIN ONCE

	// first line in ide/main.cpp where the GUI is used

Fixable, just forgot to fix it.

For SetDarkThemeEnabled, I propose something like:

void SetDarkThemeEnabled(darkSkin = Ctrl::AutodetectDarkSkin);

with

Ctrl::AutodetectDarkSkin autodetecting and behaving like old SetDarkThemeEnabled(true)
Ctrl::DarkSkin always dark, with SetDarkThemeEnabled(true) and sEmulateDarkTheme always true
Ctrl::WhiteSkin always light, with SetDarkThemeEnabled(false) and sEmulateDarkTheme always false

And bool IsSystemThemeDark() made public.

Well, it is worth to keep in mind that the whole mechanism of dark theme in Windows is probably temporary solution. What we are doing there is to emulate dark mode even as Microsoft does not support it for good old win32 applications. It is very likely that this will change and the whole emulation and color conversion for S colors will be done by Win32.

Something that can read and write system colors, you can code in it, outputs in Painter for smooth scaleable graphics, but the end result will of course be cached as an image like Chameleon does today.

I'll look over Esc/Usc and see if they can be hooked up for Painter...