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Re: U++ 2019.1.rc4 released [message #51595 is a reply to message #51590]

Thu, 18 April 2019 20:31

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mirek wrote on Thu, 18 April 2019 15:54

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

Let's agree to disagree on this one Smile

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Everything is a singleton and U++ often updates stuff in a surprising fashion. And there are macros involved. When choosing color at runtime, I can't write code like: oh, it looks like I'm using black ink on black paper. This is what the curent theme asks of me. The curent theme is dark. Let me see if the system theme does not have a light color for this element?

And this extends to CodeEditor too. If you make those colors work and be different for several programming languages, like when writing an IDE, dark and light theme, plus user profiles you can load or save, the whole updating singletons does not look like a good idea to me. I've been struggling with this for a long time. I remember for months when a single background color would not update because you had to update it outside of CodeEditor or vice-versa.

Tomorrow I'll continue investigating dark mode and see if I can can turn this mess into a half decent looking skin.

So how do you activate the dark theme in an application using SetSkin, let's say in AddressBook.

Other things:
- 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.
- Not just icons, but everything else needs to have light mode/dark mode override. Like in TheIDE, as you described and I have noticed, CodeEditor and GUI light/dark mode are separate. This is perfectly fine, as long as each knows if it is dark/light and can access both light and dark colors at the same time. So singleton SColorFace just won't do.
- The standard U++ set skin code must set the controls/icons dark/light flag on request and only then.

Tomorrow I will go over all the colors, replace them with red and blue, see how they work and what they affect and hopefully correct this theme problem for my apps, if not for TheIDE.

The problem is that I'm not good at graphics design. I would certainly pay an affordable to designer to create a professional GUI theme. Until then all I can do is look at screenshots on the Internat and try out colors and skins.

I'm also thinking of replacing icons with SVG ans scale them on app activation, but like I said in a post, SVG are drawn with white background and that is nonsensical. Default should be Null color. Another thing to fork.

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