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skyjake / lagrange

A Beautiful Gemini Client
https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
1.19k stars 62 forks source link

.Xresources support #306

Open dzwdz opened 3 years ago

dzwdz commented 3 years ago

It would be pretty nice if there was an option to use the color scheme / fonts from the user's Xresources.

skyjake commented 3 years ago

Personally I have only a little experience using Xresources for customization, so some additional information would be helpful.

Xresources is an X11-specific feature while Lagrange is a platform-agnostic application. Therefore, this request breaks into two aspects: the internal changes needed for customized color schemes and fonts, and the configuration interface. As to the former, #263 has already been implemented to change UI colors, but not page themes. There is an option to set one custom font as a fallback if the bundled fonts don't work, but system-provided fonts (#195) generally are not implemented yet. Changing the UI font is not supported either.

The configuration interface is primarily Lagrange's own configuration files, which are managed in a cross-platform manner as plain text files. It is possible to add platform-specific alternative configuration methods, such as Xresources, that would override the basic config files.

So, the question is, what would be the added value of Xresources-based customization that would justify adding a redundant configuration interface, considering that the built-in configuration files will already provide a way to customize everything that can be customized? For example, is the use case here to enable customizing Lagrange to look more like other X11 apps on one's system, using wildcard definitions in Xresources?

dzwdz commented 3 years ago

For example, is the use case here to enable customizing Lagrange to look more like other X11 apps on one's system, using wildcard definitions in Xresources?

Yup - currently pretty much everything on my desktop uses my Xresources settings, and Lagrange is one of the odd ones out. It's nice to have everything use the same colors without having to mess around with the settings too much.

Also, to save you some searching around - here's a code example showing how to read Xresources. I'm not sure if this code fails gracefully when not using X, though.