Design discussion here

[JosephMcc]

To help avoid a bunch of random threads and help keep things organized, put all design discussion in one place. Don't use this issue for bug reports or problems. Please post separate issues for each bug you encounter.

All ideas are welcome. Not every idea can or will be implemented. Theme styling is subjective and people have a very wide variety of tastes and ideas. We would like the feedback though.

[Redsandro]

Contrast

At first I was worried about the effectiveness of the lack of contrast in mint-y-dark as mentioned in #12. Mint-y-dark is a flat theme, but just as our visual perception of a gradient from black to white is actually non-linear (hello gamma), contrast on a dark theme can be higher for the same visual effect as a light theme.

But the theme works for other settings and the dim contrast might be exactly what people are looking for, so for a more contrasty theme it would be better if we/I/someone would create a custom theme based on mint-y-dark for that purpose.

Contrast on tabs

That said, I do find myself carefully moving my eyes over all Chrome and Terminal tabs to find which is the active one more than usual when trying out this theme. I do want to put forward the idea of making the active tab stand out more, one way or the other.

Overshoot indicator (dashed line)

Since no-more-content in lists is indicated by a green android-esque gradient, should the dashed line that indicates more-content perhaps also be green to signify a visual connection between both indicators?

[ccprog]

I don't understand why Cinnamon uses its own font, and with Futura one that was never meant as a on-screen typeface. Readability is really lacking in my opinion, especially the smaller variants of the dark theme.

Cinamon Calendar: weekday font is definitely too small, week numbers are off for me. (Cinnamon 3.0.5 on LMDE 2, Futura Bk BT is installed. - I know the windows/controls parts are unsuitable here, but the DE part should make no difference.)

[JosephMcc]

@ccprog that's a good point. I didn't realize it was attempting to use Futura which I don't have installed. I feel thats more of a bug and I'll fix that.

[agurenko]

To be honest this particular Calendar applet has same issues with Noto Sans and and Cantarell fonts as well. It's a problem of lack of customization of applet itself, rather than a particular font imo.

[JosephMcc]

The default sans font seems to work well. I removed the use of Futura. I'm not sure the location of the week numbers can be moved in the theme.

@Lord-Phoenix if you discover a problem in the actual applet itself please open an issue on the cinnamon github page. Provide a way to reproduce the issue and maybe a screenshot of what's happening so it can be fixed. If the problem is with the actual applet this isn't really the place.

[agurenko]

@JosephMcc no,no don't get me wrong, it's more like a feature request really. Default sans works, just as well as most of the fonts, but it all depends on a screen resolution & dpi. At FHD on 14" no matter what I try, it's too small to be comfortable, on the other hand, it's just numbers, no integration for events or anything, so at this point, kind of whatever :)

[ourichermath]

I don't know if it's a function of screen resolution, but I think the spacing between the program icons at the left side of the panel is too small (same feeling about Mint-X under 17.x). The default spacing is 1px. That just leaves the icons smashed up right next to each other. A bigger spacing would be nice (I use 5px). From cinnamon.css:

panel-launchers-box {

padding-left: 7px; }

.panel-launcher { margin: 1px; padding: 1px; <====== HERE IT IS transition-duration: 200; } .panel-launcher:hover { border: 0px solid #9ab87c; border-bottom-width: 1px; }

[ghost]

Apologies if this should be in its own thread.

I find that it is hard to see which button is highlighted on the shutdown menu.

The menu I have in mind is the one that appears when one presses the power button (on a laptop) or selects 'quit' from the MintMenu. The overly subtle highlighting - which does matter because it indicates what will happen if the user presses return - varies with 'Control' theme. With the Mint-Y theme, the highlighting is, to me at least, too subtle.

I would attach a screenshot, but Mint's inbuilt function for that, and indeed a third-party tool that I use, have trouble taking a shot whilst Mint's shutdown dialogue box is open. Still, to reproduce the issue, all ones needs to do is to select the Mint-Y Control theme, then start shutdown, and then move between the buttons with the cursor keys.

Although the highlighting does alter with (at least some) themes, the problem may in part owe to Cinnamon . .

[JosephMcc]

The entire color scheme of Mint-Y is more subtle than that of Mint-X. It's not going to fit everyones taste and is a large part of the reason Mint-X is still there as a choice and a used as the default.

[ghost]

Making this particular bit of highlighting - or all button highlighting, if the change could only be global - slightly more pronounced seem to me to be desirable and simple.

It is desirable, for it would restore some functionality, in that one can now much more easily see what one is doing with the dialogue in question. It is simple, because I imagine (please correct me if I am wrong) that it could be done without altering other aspect of Mint-Y.

Users could avoid the problem by changing to another theme. What, though, if they like Mint-Y in all (or nearly all) other respects? I for one do like it in nearly all other respects.

[ghost]

I would like to add two things - or, rather two questions.

(1) If for reasons I find hard to fathom (why have a highlight that it is very hard to see, and so functions poorly as a highlight?), the highlighting is not going to be changed, could you please help me out by directing me to the part of the theme that codes for this so that I can change it on my own system? Thank you.

(2) Seemingly, in the shutdown dialogue to which I referred before, no button is highlighted by default, even though pressing return will select one of the actions. It seems to be that this should be changed - but where should I report this, please? The Cinnamon bugtracker? EDIT: Ah, this problem is in fact theme specific. It doesn't happen with the theme Mint-X-Blue, for instance . .

[JosephMcc]

(1) needs to be changed in quite a few places to get it matching across all versions of the theme, gtk2, 3, Cinnamon, etc.

(2) This could be improved in the theme

[ghost]

I have just discovered a user-created theme, namely, Mint-XY. It seems to solve my problem with the highlighting on the shutdown menu.

[JosephMcc]

The benefit of open-source

[Cos-mo]

My main concern about themes is, to make

• the title bar easily distinguishable from the rest of the window
• to make it easily recognizable, which window has currently the focus; this is not always the top most window and possibly none window has the focus at all but the desktop.

None of the Mint-X themes really gives me a satisfying solution for both, only with the border theme "Crux" (or a third party theme) I get a working solution.

Mint-Y Darker seems at first as way in the right direction, but for my old eyes this is not an option for daily work, far too tiring. Note: This is not a question about a visual preference, but of usability. For my eyes using dark themes (at least as they appear at now) are a penalization.

Another problem with Mint-Y: In Cinnamon you have the option to set additional title bar icons in the window settings. The required icons are obviously missing in Mint-Y, so Mint-Y is unusable with this.

[JosephMcc]

@Cos-mo The contrast between different parts of the theme is something we talked about a lot (and tweaked a lot) while working on the theme. The whole idea was to come up with a more modern style of theme then what we had with Mint-X. It's something that has been requested a lot over the last couple years.

The things your talking about and the newer modern styling that a lot of people like kind of go hand in hand. We knew not everyone would be happy with it, just like they aren't with MInt-X. I honestly don't see us going with a titlebar style that is drastically different from the rest of the like you get with Crux. If you have ideas that might improve things without completely changing the style I'm all ears.

Another problem with Mint-Y: In Cinnamon you have the option to set additional title bar icons in the window settings. The required icons are obviously missing in Mint-Y, so Mint-Y is unusable with this.

https://github.com/linuxmint/mint-y-theme/issues/15

[Cos-mo]

@JospehMcc: As I wrote, my concern is not visual preference for the one or other design decision. Personal taste is not discussable.

My concern and the message I tried to communicate is usability. In this context I wrote, that Mint-Y-Darker is not an option for me.

Here is a theme, which I use since some years and which does mostly do what I want: https://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Bluebird+metacity?content=140011#files-panel (It has a small compatibility problem, but nothing serious.) Perfectly distinguishable title bars for active and not active windows, for both of them perfectly readable, and the support for the additional icons does exist also.

To make it really clear: I do not expect that Mint-X or Mint-Y (or Mint-Z at some day) do look like that. But what I urgently need is a theme, which gives the equivalent visibility and distinctness as this does. That is, what I want and need to point out in this discussion.

I hope, that I have your ears.

[JosephMcc]

Ok, so here is what I see looking at your screenshot. An unfocused window dulls out the titlebars font and titlebar buttons. We already do that. In gtk3 apps even the menubar and toolbar items get this effect. The other big difference obviously is the fact that the titlebar is colored. That isn't going too happen as it's way to far outside the overall design of Mint-Y.

Where I would be willing to experiment with the use of colors like that is if/when we decide to do color variations for Mint-Y. It might look nice if instead of just changing the selected_bg_color to say blue, red, or whatever like we do in MInt-X. We could actually look at coloring the title, menu, and tool bars with those colors. I feel like it might look nice in a flat theme like Mint-Y. We would probably then get accused of it being too "Google Material design", but whatever. You can't win with everyone ;)

[alxgvr]

Make window edges more rounded, please.

One thing I literally hate about Arc theme - razor sharp window edges. Like you can cut your finger if you touch it...

I like more traditional rounded edges like good old Mint-X theme, Ambiance, OsX, many others... I understand that Mint is looking for new modern look. But, please, not so radical...

I would like to ask Mint team to redraw window edges in Mint-Y theme in traditional rounded way. Mint-Y is custom Arc theme? Make it less Arc - more custom ;)

[z3n0e]

This is the button close is not on hover:

This is, instead, the button close on hover:

Maybe the close button is better red on hover

[NicoHood]

The upstream Arc theme is now maintained here: https://github.com/NicoHood/arc-theme

We are currently improving to support different default colors, so distributions like manjaro should be able to build their own colored theme with upstream patches, but different colors.

Why not help us fix bugs upstream and we integrate your colors as well? That would help both projects.

cc @fossfreedom

[JosephMcc]

Cool to see you guys have picked it back up. I don't mind helping pushing fixes upstream but our version of the theme is a bit different than the stock version. The longer we have it the more it probably veers away from the original.

I'm also only just now working on getting it ported to gtk3.22 as we haven't needed that support until now.

[mrprobot]

Will there ever be other color schemes for mint-y? I basically like the theme, but the green highlight color isn't exactly the color of choice for me.

[Sadi58]

If it doesn't require too many work I think it might be a good idea to re-base Mint-Y GTK theme on https://github.com/NicoHood/arc-theme which will eventually pay back avoiding issues that have already been resolved there (e.g. current lack of tab highlighting when one copies or moves an item between Nemo tabs).