Subduing the bright window border colors

[Chris Laprise]

Hi All,

The window border colors have always been too intense for my tastes...
Its the only thing I consistently dislike about Qubes when I open an
app. The worst are the green, yellow and red. At one point I found
myself using only orange and grey for all my new vms because those were
easier on my eyes. :)

So I decided to experiment with the KDE plugin Plastik for Qubes.
My objectives are:

1. Remove the overt glare from the worst offenders.
2. Reduce impingement on concentration and window content: It should be
possible to work on graphical and other subjective content without being
distracted or influenced by the UI elements (window borders).
3. Retain the borders basic Qubes function of signaling vm's status
(colors should still be easily recognizable).
4. Function with either light or dark desktop themes or documents
without creating eyestrain.

Tinkering and tests going between the laptop display and a decent
external monitor have resulted in the following palette for qubeslabels.cpp:

QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_DOM0, "dom0", QColor::fromHsv (0, 0, 210),
Qt::black),
QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_RED, "red", QColor::fromHsv (0,154, 168),
Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_ORANGE, "orange", QColor::fromHsv (23,175,
173), Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_YELLOW, "yellow", QColor::fromHsv (55,147,
170), Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_GREEN, "green", QColor::fromHsv (120,138,
150), Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_GRAY, "gray", QColor::fromHsv (0,0, 130),
Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_BLUE, "blue", QColor::fromHsv (215,180,
155), Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_PURPLE, "purple", QColor::fromHsv (300,125,
108), Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_BLACK, "black", QColor::fromHsv (0, 0, 0))

The attached screenshot shows what this looks like...

What do you think? Suggestions and constructive criticism welcome!

Chris

[Jeremias E.]

Hello,

I like the bright colors.

What I want to say with that is, the colors should not be hard coded. It should be possible to configure the colors
via Qubes Mananger.

Best regards
  J. Eppler

[Chris Laprise]

> --

To reduce eyestrain I use darker color themes in dom0 and vms. This new
palette works much better with them.

Yes, it would be nice to have a settings panel for the colors. Maybe
when KDE5 comes...

Chris

[Iestyn Best]

I like the look of what you have done Chris. Good work.

It would be good if the Qubes-OS team could implement some basic theming options. Let see how they go with the work for the GUI vm and KDE5.

[Chris Laprise]

Thanks,

Using them for the past week has been a big relief to my eyes, esp. with
DeepDark plugin for FF and TB and of course the built-in dark themes of
KDE and Gnome. I will post these and other changes to github soon.

I have some ideas for improving window borders in KDE5 also, such as
displaying the borders' color when hovering over them.

Chris

[Chris Laprise]

On 05/14/2016 02:03 PM, Chris Laprise wrote:
> [...]

>
> QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_DOM0, "dom0", QColor::fromHsv (0, 0, 210),
> Qt::black),
> QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_RED, "red", QColor::fromHsv (0,154, 168),
> Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
> QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_ORANGE, "orange", QColor::fromHsv (23,175,
> 173), Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
> QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_YELLOW, "yellow", QColor::fromHsv (55,147,
> 170), Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
> QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_GREEN, "green", QColor::fromHsv (120,138,
> 150), Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
> QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_GRAY, "gray", QColor::fromHsv (0,0, 130),
> Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
> QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_BLUE, "blue", QColor::fromHsv (215,180,
> 155), Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
> QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_PURPLE, "purple", QColor::fromHsv
> (300,125, 108), Qt::black, Qt::lightGray),
> QubesLabel (QUBES_LABEL_BLACK, "black", QColor::fromHsv (0, 0, 0))

Marek,

What is the recommended way to put these color changes to use in KDE5?

I noticed there is a 'qubes-generate-color-palette' script which saves
some values under ~/.local/share/qubes-kde, and that changing these
values affects the borders of app windows. Presumably, these values get
re-written on each login to the desktop.

Is there also a way to change the standard border colors that affect
menus and non-app windows?

Chris

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

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Yes.

> Is there also a way to change the standard border colors that affect menus
> and non-app windows?

For menus (I assume you're talking about 2px frames) those colors are
given on qubes-guid command line. And source of those parameters is
here:
https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-core-admin/blob/master/core/qubes.py#L931

This is also from where `qubes-generate-color-palette` gets its input.
The file is installed into
/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/qubes/qubes.py.

In Qubes 4.0, it will be configurable...

Note that other supported window managers have those colors hardcoded
(same as KDE4...). This includes Xfce4.

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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