[Feature Request] Complete dark-mode

[ItsIgnacioPortal]

As of Cherry Tree 0.39.4 you can change the colors of the Tree and Rich text sections, but you can't change the colors of the Toolbar, nor the colors of the Divisor beetwen the Tree and the Rich Text section:

It'd be really cool to be able to have the entirety of Cherry Tree on dark-mode ^^

PS: I love this project! It's been really usefull for keeping rich notes

[txe]

Hi, 0.39 (gtk2) is not supported anymore, you can use 0.99 (gkt3) from https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/#testing. To change control colors for gtk3 app, you can either:

• change the system gtk3 theme
• change the gtk3 theme for the concrete app
• change ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css to tweak styles. E.g. to change the separator color

  .ct-app-win box.vertical paned.horizontal separator{
  background-color:green;
  }

  To see more about widgets and how to change their outlook by css, read about GTK_DEBUG=interactive

[ItsIgnacioPortal]

I should mention that I'm on Windows 10. Do I place the gtk.css file on C:\Program Files\CherryTree\etc\gtk-3.0 ? (Where C:\Program Files\CherryTree\ is the path where CherryTree 99.13 is installed) I'm completely unfamiliar with GTK 😅

[txe]

Well, it is probably there, I'm not sure too. You can try, and if it doesn't work, I will take a look.

[ItsIgnacioPortal]

I went with the shotgun aproach, and placed the gtk.css on every single folder named gtk-3.0 on my system... and it worked! Now time to figure out wich location was the right one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Thanks for the quick replies!

I'll edit this comment later to specify the correct location hehe

UPDATE: To change the system-wide GTK theme, place/change the file in: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\gtk-3.0\gtk.css I don't know how to change cherrytree's specific GTK theme

[ItsIgnacioPortal]

I may have closed this issue prematurely...

Where are the themes stored? (Cobalt, Kate, Oblivion, etc) I'm trying to make everything have a background color of #000000, and there doesn't seem to be an option pick a custom background color for Rich Text

[txe]

mingw64\share\gtksourceview-3.0\styles

[giuspen]

@PinkDev1 go to the preferences dialog, tab themes and for a #000000 background choose "cobalt-darkened" theme

[ItsIgnacioPortal]

I've changed the contents of gtk.css to:

* {
    background-color: #000;
}

But now, the icons don't look good, so I tried to fix it by recursively inverting all of the icons in C:\Program Files\CherryTree\mingw64\share\icons, but nothing has changed. Is there a way to invert the icons in cherrytree manually, or do I have to build it with the modified icons?

It seems CherryTree doesn't need the "Icons" folder to work (I renamed it and launched CT, and it worked perfectly), so maybe we could make future installations lighter by not packing that folder in?

@giuspen there's no "cobalt-darkened" theme on v99.13

BTW I inverted all images recursively using Image Magick ( FOR /R %a IN (*.*) DO magick mogrify -negate "%a" )

[giuspen]

@PinkDev1 that's a bug then, the following 2 themes https://github.com/giuspen/cherrytree/tree/master/styles are not being loaded correctly in the delivered package, I'll have a look

[ItsIgnacioPortal]

My guessing is that the cobalt-darkened, and amy themes weren't placed on the correct folder, becouse while all other styles are stored in CherryTree\mingw64\share\gtksourceview-3.0\styles, cobalt-darkened.xml and amy.xml are stored in CherryTree\mingw64\usr\share\cherrytree\styles\, and therefor CT doesn't read those files when loading the styles list.

UPDATE: Confirmed. After copying the files the the correct location, CT was able to load them. BTW, it seems gtk.css overrides most propierties aplied by themes. The more you know 🌠

[giuspen]

In cherrytree we are extending the folder where to search for styles and syntax highlightings but on windows the path was wrong, I should have fixed in 0.99.14 where hopefully you will not have to mix the cherrytree styles and language-specs with the defaults in the library

[txe]

@PinkDev1, the icons currently are build in the exe file, so you cannot change them. We should probably consider to put them into files instead.

[txe]

@PinkDev1 , instead of changing gtk3.css, you can try custom dark themes from the internet. Read more about that in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37035936/how-to-get-native-windows-decorations-on-gtk3-on-windows-7-and-msys2#

[ItsIgnacioPortal]

@PinkDev1, the icons currently are build in the exe file, so you cannot change them. We should probably consider to put them into files instead.

That'd be perfect. I could upload the inverted icons as well, so ppl won't have to invert those +100pngs again ^^

Yeah, it's all coming together

[txe]

Hi @PinkDev1, user custom icons will be looked up in .config/cherrytree/icons in the next release. Original icons and their names you can find in https://github.com/giuspen/cherrytree/tree/master/icons

[crogonint]

@PinkDev1 I believe there are new icon sets that DO work with dark themes built in to GTK 3.0. You might want to dig around in what is already there before you go reinventing the wheel. ;) Like almost everything, Linux adopted dark themes first when everybody wanted them, and M$ only added them when people started getting irritated that they couldn't have them.

Personally, I'd rather have cherrytree specific icons with a white or light colored aura around them, if necessary, rather than inverted. Inverted colorful icons look like photo negatives and are harder to identify. Inverted black icons are perfectly fine, of course.

I don't care for flat black backgrounds, either though. I prefer a nice charcoal gray or dark blue. The point of the dark background is to not stress your eyeballs with all of that contrast of black on white. If you switch to white on black, it's basically the same thing. Sort of. ;)

[ItsIgnacioPortal]

Hi @PinkDev1, user custom icons will be looked up in .config/cherrytree/icons in the next release. Original icons and their names you can find in https://github.com/giuspen/cherrytree/tree/master/icons

And where will that path be on Windows?

[txe]

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\cherrytree\icons