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Nikia Longino

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Aug 3, 2024, 6:07:35 PM8/3/24

to tfulfingoodprel

Hi, I am debating whether to upgrade to 3 from 1. I, too, am having problems with the themes and changes to only part of the background. The reason, I was trying this is that I find tiny greyed icons very difficult to see and differentiate. Also the use of a pastel shade to the font rather than a good strong black or dark colour does not make it easy for me. Any simple tweaks to make the main screens more readable, please?

I have the same problem. Tried it for almost 2 hours and then gave up. Works on the default theme, but not on any other theme. Changes on the default theme are not saveable as an own theme. Would love to have this fixed. Looks just stupid the way it works right now

And you will need a coding environment which can read .pal files, .qss, and XML.
Those are the only three files you will be editing; as the preferences file, you would edit from within Scrivener by setting your options.

Everything else can be changed though. So for me, I changed the highlight / transparency, foreground and background colors, as well as the color scheme. This you cannot do from within scrivener and it takes a little time, as you must alter the qss file as well as the pal file and the xml file.

Thomas, if it has been awhile; CSS is radically different from when it was part of HTML. If your background is HTML3 or even 4, I recommend hitting YouTube or Free Code camp. And QSS is again a bit different from CSS. There are tons of articles on it though, so you should be fine. And VS code has support for QSS.

.pal is a palette file, this one was brand new to me too. From what I could dig up, it is an 18-bit!!! antiquated color-scheme frequently used in legacy video games. So, a slight wrinkle, as when you type in RGB values, PAL will convert if from the 255 shades of RGB to its 18-bit system, so the colors show up somewhat different. .pal does not take RGBA either.

I have explored this extensively and checked on windows forums and there is no way to do a direct port of this as of right now. It has to be done by hand. Perhaps a developer could write a shell script or program that could automatically make these conversions (which probably wouldn't be too hard on the Linux side of things because of the standardized format of icon themes).

Currently I'm doing this by hand with a Windows app called Icon Packager by Stardock. How to handle windows part I am unsure as I am not a windows developer. I think it could probably be done for a lot of applications using shell scripts and regedit though... hmmmm perhaps.

This link might also be useful if anyone else decides to take up this project. I'm considering doing it myself but I have a few other priorities to finish up first. -us/windows/desktop/shell/how-to-assign-a-custom-icon-to-a-file-type

However, I really dislike the OSX "theme" - it seems too grey and sterile to me, and isn't something that I'd hoped would grow on me while using my uncle's iMac. (I seem to recall the only other option was to go completely grey with a charcoal color scheme.) ?

It's seems utterly bizarre that Windows, arisen from a business OS, should have such freedom to customize the UI globally than OSX - a product targetted at the more 'creative', right-brained and individualistic consumer. I would have thought it would be the other way around, with Windows restricting you a single grey theme, and OSX giving users the freedom to paint their user experience in whatever colors suits their personality.

I realize that restricting significant user customization of the OSX UI is done primarily to limit vectors for system destabilizing modifications, but basic theming (like color schemes) can still be implemented safely.

My two cents on the philosophy. The interface is dull and grey because it isn't important. I have no desire to see the interface. The content is what is important. Making the interface flashy and eye-catching would detract from what is really important.

As was pointed out, despite continual complaints and third-party "solutions" since they started making a color system, Apple has never offered any way to customize the UI, except for some very minor options.

Yep, I did that just before I made my original post. I figured I'd also see what the Mac community had to say - to see if it was an idea others liked as well, and also to get feedback (in case I was just plain ingnorant) and there was a way to change themes I didn't know about, or some third party theming utilities like Window Blinds or something out there.

Speaking for myself, the look of the UI has a tremendous impact when I spend hours a day working at the computer doing web development and digital imaging. (i.e. I'd be institutionalized within a week if I had to use Window's blue "Luna" theme that was clearly designed by students at a clown college while on LSD.)

You are wrong, Mac OS, all generations, was a very good and better OS just because it did not include such useless settings and aditions, and that is precisely why Linux is so sensitive to such useless settings and aditions. The more such stupidities are added, the more frequent crashes are reported.

You can get socks for your iPod, cases for Apple hardware in every conceivable color, style and material, and yet the thing you interact with the most Apple won't allow personalization beyond wallpaper.

If Apple implemented the themes and customization parameters, then it's fairly certain that it would not adversely effect stability. Personally I'm not interested in elaborate things like a transluscent zebra skin UI, but just a few color scheme options and configurations beyond what's currently available.

I've used Windows computers, both bought and built desktops and notebooks from Dell, for the last 19+ years that have always been stable. I can count on one hand the number of BSODs I've had with any version of Windows.

What I meant was I've always built my own systems to create a reliable system. Not having to suffer rickety, bloatware loaded Dells, Compaqs and other off the shelf computers with cheap components is exactly why I did custom builds...and why building solid systems for musicians and graphics clients was part of my business.

Yes I am running the preview version of Win 8 in a VM on both Mac and Win 7 computers and in that version you can disable the Metro desktop and I've even installed Classic Shell (as I can't stand the newer Cartoon type interfaces).

The one big thing I notice about OS X is that even though it is a Graphical User Interface there are much less user options on how to change/customize that GUI then there are in any version of Windows. And for some normal settings, like not having the Help Window "Always On Top" of all other windows, "Show All Files" and others you have to use terminal and type in a command to change those common settings.

Now I understand that there are specific VCL themes you can select from the project options for an application and some of those are Windows 10 related however in the application I'm building I was wanting to provide a choice to the user of either an unthemed VCL application which uses the Windows 10 OS theme or one of the VCL themes but my current experiments suggest that an unthemed VCL application does not use the OS theme.

Go to the project options dialog, Application -> Manifest node. Do you have the "enable run-time themes" checkbox checked? (Caption may be different, i'm extrapolating from a german IDE here). If you use a custom manifest for the application it needs to contain the equivalent entry for that.

Enable Runtime Themes and using VCL Styles are different things. The former is enabled in the Application Manifest settings while the latter is configured in Application Appearance. A Default Style setting of Windows should use the OS Style. Note that both require to Enable Runtime Themes.

Testing had revealed that the theme was totally broken on Windows XP. This had two main causes; first of all there was some bugs in the Win32 theme APIs on XP when rendering to surfaces with alpha, and secondly the css file used some windows theme parts that only existed in Vista and later. I added workarounds for the alpha bug and introduced a new css file that is used on XP (although most of the css is shared). So, now XP support is working.

Thanks for your work
and i have a question too. do you have any plan for supporting drag and drop(i mean d&d between a gtk app and a third party app for example a browser. i think it needs OLE) in windows?

When i first installed Xubuntu i had blue borders around every window, and i was able to remove these by changing their opacity to 0.1 in my compton settings. But as you can see in the screenshot below, because i just changed their opacity they are obviously still there causing these 2px wide gaps between my windows.

One quick way to remove borders from xfwm4 themes is to delete all the files starting with "bottom", "left" and "right" in your window manager's xfwm4 folder. This works well when coupled with "Windows snapping to other windows" (Settings Manager > Window Manager > Advanced) but will cause you some difficulties when trying to resize the window using the mouse.