Light Theme

[egeerardyn]

I think it would be rad to have some light theme variants on top of our current dark ones. In the old repo, there was some animo for a light theme.

Apparently, @skabr has already made one in YabataDesign/afterglow-theme#17 a long time ago, but it's not publicly available. Hopefully he is willing to still share the files and otherwise we should roll our own.

[simonhaenisch]

Hi, I just took some time to create a first version of a light theme. It's just a .sublime-theme file (zipped so I could upload it). If you like it, you can take it and improve it, feel free to change whatever you want to... it's not really tested and some sidebar icons are too bright, so it might be necessary to add some darkened icons for the light theme (i.e. json, tex, sql and all the other orange icons). Also I didn't have time to create light tab bar png's, so there is no bottom border on dirty tabs yet.

Alpenglow Light.zip

To-do's are:

• [ ] create tab bar png files (to highlight dirty tabs)
• [ ] set layer textures for tab bar
• [ ] create darkened icons
• [ ] test all elements/theme settings

Color scheme in the screenshot is Solarized Light.

[egeerardyn]

In general I like it. Thank you for your work on this! This will be useful to start a separate "light" branch during the development phase.

I don't know what the technical limitations are, but instead of making darker icons, probably it's less work to have a slightly darker sidebar (e.g. the color of that scrollbar)

Let me add another TODO:

• [ ] make a light highlighting scheme in the style of this theme/Alpenglow (instead of the Solarized one shown here).

[simonhaenisch]

Quite difficult to get a good contrast with a darker sidebar:

Creating darker icons shouldn't be hard really, i.e. create a black layer on top of the icon and use a layer mode like overlay. I even managed to do it with gimp (have to work with windows in my work environment) :yum:

[vikjam]

A quick and dirty way to make all the icons darker would be to use convert from ImageMagick.

for f in *.png; do convert $f -gamma 0.5 $f; done

or

for f in *.png; do convert $f -level 50x100% $f; done

That said, are there themes that keep two sets of icons? Perhaps a separate long term goal should be to recreate all the icons in vector form and use only the Alpenglow colors.

[bmcminn]

A dropshadow could be enough to alleviate the contrast issue. Another option could be to tweak the sidebar background color to achieve better contrast in conjunction with increasing the icon saturation.

Maybe a mix of all three techniques?

[egeerardyn]

@vikjam: I have no idea whether other themes use multiple icon sets (is that even technically viable?), but the maintenance cost of that is what worries me a bit.

I would love to see vectorized icons if ST can handle those directly (I hope I haven't deleted my vectorized MATLAB icon).

[simonhaenisch]

Another way for the icons would be to make them all white and then color them using Sublime Text functionality. This is how it works i.e. for the folder icons in the sidebar. That way there is only one icon for each file type and the light theme can just color them differently. Wouldn't allow icons with multiple colors though (which might not necessarily be a drawback).

Means some work: make the icons white -> find the correct color for each icon -> set it up in the theme.

Anyway I don't really think it's a problem to have extra icons for a light theme... just suffix them with -light, then change the paths in the theme file. As I said there are only a few icons that need to be darkened (especially the orange ones).

[vikjam]

I saw a Sublime Package that provides icons in SVG. It's worth considering integrating it into Alpenglow so that we can easily switch between icon colors.