Dark Mode

[meza]

Hello,

This is a feature request for Dark Mode if it's possible. I - as I'm sure many others - play ark way into the night. I tend to have the Extractor on the secondary screen in full screen and all the white is blasting way too strong.

Example:

[cadon]

Hi, it's requested multiple times, sadly in the used framework not easy to implement. A darkmode is on the todo list, not sure how we implement that exactly yet, though, and no fixed ETA. This tool might help a bit: http://multiscreenblank.nookkin.com/about.ndoc, it can dim a monitor or parts of it by overlaying a semitransparent black area, I use it with 50% on my second screen if it is too bright. I know, not the solution you requested, but maybe better than without it.

[jnpl95]

I worked on this a bit today and got a hacky solution, but it does not handle new controls well, only existing controls, so new menustrip items or messageboxes/forms are unchanged. Also anything that has custom colors is not handled well (look at gif below, library tab). If I continue to work on it and fix the above issues, then I'll submit a pull request

[meza]

This is great! Just please make sure not to use pure black and white, that kind of defeats the purpose of reducing the contrast strain :)

There's a bunch of good tips here: https://atmos.style/blog/dark-mode-ui-best-practices

[jnpl95]

This is great! Just please make sure not to use pure black and white, that kind of defeats the purpose of reducing the contrast strain :)

There's a bunch of good tips here: https://atmos.style/blog/dark-mode-ui-best-practices

Oh it wasn't pure black and white, altho it did look like that in the gif, it was #0b0b0b which is close to black. But I'll try and use a better color. Do you have a suggestion? I'm leaning towards using visual studio's dark mode color Visual Studio Color Reference

And do you think it'd be better to add an option in the settings pane for the user to customize? The thing with that is, there's no good area to put a textbox or color chooser in Settings -> General Tab, it's pretty saturated, and I find it hard to justify creating a whole new tab in settings for just dark mode. Maybe I can make a color chooser area fit in the Visuals groupbox in the General tab, reducing the color mode dropdown size, altho I'm not sure about that

[meza]

Personally I much more prefer the background colour of the IDE that you have at the beginning of the gif, it's definitely less strain but it's also a personal preference so ignore me on that one 😅 I do suspect that it would make the controls play nicer though.

As for the settings, I don't think it's important for an initial version. Maybe having all the colours out in a theme-dark.json and then allowing people to set a different json file for themselves could be great.

That would also enable theme sharing among the community which would probably end up with something fantastic in the long run.

[jnpl95]

Personally I much more prefer the background colour of the IDE that you have at the beginning of the gif, it's definitely less strain but it's also a personal preference so ignore me on that one 😅 I do suspect that it would make the controls play nicer though.

That was visual studio (the colors I'm going to set as default for first release) depending on if I can correctly get the controls to properly display the colors. Windows Forms is a super old UI framework like @cadon mentioned. So it's hard to properly style them without making custom control overrides for a lot of them. But I'll see what I can do

As for the settings, I don't think it's important for an initial version. Maybe having all the colours out in a theme-dark.json and then allowing people to set a different json file for themselves could be great.

That would also enable theme sharing among the community which would probably end up with something fantastic in the long run.

Great idea, for now will hardcode the colors and see about expansibility after, if it all works ok (big if, the framework is 21 years old now, old enough to drink in the states lol)

[meza]

I wonder if it slowly would become a better alternative to port the project over to React and Electron

[jnpl95]

Probably, but that's up to Cadon...switching to React/Electron would require a ton of effort I assume. I'm personally more experienced with winforms and wpf. I've tried to learn Microsoft's new MAUI, but I found that without a visual designer, it takes a long time to make a great UI with just hot reload, it's their number one commented on issue but they seem to have other priorities smh