Darktable Themer

Software darktable
1

Over the past few days, I’ve continued working on a Darktable themer.

Now that everything is basically working well, I’ve been wondering whether it makes sense to make such a tool publicly available.

On the one hand, it’s a joy to be able to customize your own designs precisely.

On the other hand, this might be one step too many and not good for Darktable. The developers put a lot of thought into the design.

So, before I make a decision, I’d like to hear your opinions.

My current inclination, by the way, is not to do it.

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Blue scrollbars, stars and buttons are hover.
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Companies make cars and people crash them. You are just making a tool. For every person that might go nuts with it and we’ll if that is their desire so be it … there might also be others that are grateful and make good use of it…

If someone creates a wild theme it only impacts them … Unless, as you may be thinking people will break the UI and then create or generate a lot of sos please help me traffic… :grin:

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For my part I was grateful that I could download a .css file from this forum and place it in my themes folder. Then in preferences I was able to select it or not select it as my preferred option. I certainly would like to see a few more theme options made available for DT, but I am unsure if I would try and create my own as I have few complaints with the UI of DT as it exists.

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It would be great to ship the Themer with darktable as a seperate binary.

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thanks for your opinion

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Which theme are you currently using?

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That wouldn’t be necessary, as it should (presumably) be possible to implement it in JavaScript and thus as a simple HTML page.

Currently, it uses Python as its underlying system.

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Yes, I think that this can easily be done with just javascript and html. (If I have some time the coming weeks I might even do that).

I am not sure in this way of theming caries over the GTK-4 update?

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I vote for make it available for all darktable users. I’m using my own theme on my main machine. But I’m not really used to css, so it is quite painful for me to change things. A themer would be great.

Yes, the darktable developers have made a design decision. And they made this decision for a good reason. But I am a big fan of own thinking and hate it to be overprotected. The developers gave us the possibility to use our own css. So why don’t use it.

I think some hints about the intend of the original design should be enough to let people decide if and how far they want to alter the design of the UI.

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I don’t understand why if shouldn’t be available to darktable users. darktable is all about choice. Choice to construct your own pipeline and pick your tonemapper. Being able to personalize the theme to your liking seems in line with the darktable ethos. :slightly_smiling_face:

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This is the theme I have chosen so that at a glance I can see which modules are active. The hint of green works well for me. I also see a contradiction from the developers who oppose color in the UI because my color tab has a very colorful icon supplied by default.

DT is about choice and that is one of its strengths and maybe even challenges for the developers. They have to maintain many ‘obsolete’ modules to support that choice. Anyway, I appreciate the great program that is supplied to me by volunteers so I am not whinging about the developers, just suggesting that some subtle color is not distracting in the UI.

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Note you can already tweak the theme how you want it, this just makes it easier :wink:

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Thank you so much for your feedback!

I will use the time until the GTK4 update to further develop the themer and then adapt it for GTK4.

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