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Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

hisham.hm

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Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#201

Post by cycloptic »

kiawe_fire wrote: post #181
bsdubernerd wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that theming was much more consistent a decade ago in linux-land. GTK2 + QT with GTK2-style would get you an almost seamless experience. The "dark or light" theme we have today is an absolute joke by comparison. Many Gtk-engines were also much faster in terms of pure rendering speed. Another issue as mentioned is that per-control CSS skinning breaks easily with custom themes. Instead of using system colors de…

> Another issue as mentioned is that per-control CSS skinning breaks easily with custom themes. Instead of using system colors devs often hard-code a custom look. After years of using MacOS, I made a commitment this year to use, support, and develop for Linux on a regular basis. Starting off with little knowledge of GTK, I progressed from "hello world" to working on my first app, but end user customization has always…

For whatever reason this is not well documented, but all the theme's colors are available with a special syntax in the CSS: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/blob/master/gtk/theme/A...

So for example you should be using this to use the user's foreground and background color:

    color: @theme_fg_color;
    background-color: @theme_bg_color;
You can use some modifier functions on those colors too to compute additional colors: https://developer.gnome.org/gtk4/stable/ch39s02.html

I would suggest against trying to piggy back on built-in CSS styles; usually with the default widgets you want to favor composition over inheritance. But if you really need to you can use the GTK inspector to look at the styles on any given system widget, that should be a bit easier than grepping through the CSS.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#202

Post by indymike »

jart wrote: post #185
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #175

Good Lord, just give me control over the appearance of scrollbars again. Was there some international UI/UX meeting where they declared a holy war on scrollbars? Seems like everyone is trying to make them disappear like they're an embarrassing and unwelcome distant relative they're passive aggressively trying to make go away.

What is the use case for scroll bars, now that we have mouse wheels? Progress indication? My view is that content is king and any UI element that needlessly takes away space from the content needs to be destroyed.

1. Position of elevator (the little thumb you traditionally drag up or down) shows where I'm at relative to the beginning and end of the content.

2. Size of elevator in relation to the scrollbar tells me what percentage of the content is viewable (except when the size of the elevator becomes so small it makes it unusable).

3. Up and down buttons allow a simple way to bring the next or previous item into view.

A lot of the hate of scrollbars comes from the web, where browser scrollbars could not be styled and didn't necessarily use the operating system's style. You could have a beautiful page be ruined by the default windows 3.11 style scrollbars in the browser.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#203

Post by inetknght »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #193
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #175

Good Lord, just give me control over the appearance of scrollbars again. Was there some international UI/UX meeting where they declared a holy war on scrollbars? Seems like everyone is trying to make them disappear like they're an embarrassing and unwelcome distant relative they're passive aggressively trying to make go away.

Scroolbars are useful for making large coarse leaps within a page in an instant, while scroll wheels are good for accurate positioning over short distances. But please. just stop making everything flat ffs. On the GUIs of old, you knew straight away what you could interact with, while now, everything is so flat or hidden away that everything blends together, I have no idea what I can click on and what's static unless…

> Scroolbars are useful for making large coarse leaps within a page in an instant, while scroll wheels are good for accurate positioning over short distances.

That's funny. I use them in the exact opposite way.

When I want exact positioning then I will use the scrollbar. When I want to scroll past pages and pages, I will just fling the scrollwheel.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#204

Post by indymike »

forgetfulness wrote: post #85
selfhoster11 wrote: post #36

Unpopular opinion: optimising for "branding" is what killed theming. Everyone wants to have their own custom colour theme, brand-associated font or button style, which clashes with uniformity of system controls. If everyone renders buttons in a custom way, they bypass the native, theming-capable, accessible-by-default system controls. As long as product managers are happy, it doesn't matter that users aren't.

Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010, consistency was paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important just like Apple claimed. For Apple it was about delivering a consistent branded experience, for the GNOME and KDE communities it was about being able to consistently customize the experience. In Windows? Always a free-for-all of such heavy customization on the side of the third-party applications that…

The current KDE does a great job allowing for customization.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#205

Post by [deleted] »

inetknght wrote: post #203
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroolbars are useful for making large coarse leaps within a page in an instant, while scroll wheels are good for accurate positioning over short distances. But please. just stop making everything flat ffs. On the GUIs of old, you knew straight away what you could interact with, while now, everything is so flat or hidden away that everything blends together, I have no idea what I can click on and what's static unless…

> Scroolbars are useful for making large coarse leaps within a page in an instant, while scroll wheels are good for accurate positioning over short distances. That's funny. I use them in the exact opposite way. When I want exact positioning then I will use the scrollbar. When I want to scroll past pages and pages, I will just fling the scrollwheel.

[deleted]

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#206

Post by deckard1 »

ravi-delia wrote: post #169
jcelerier wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Theming was HUGE in Linux back in 2005-2010, consistency was paramount, adherence to toolkit was extremely important just like Apple claimed. it still is, just look at how neat things in https://reddit.com/r/unixporn/ look

But none of that was configured in one place, with every other program taking its lead from that central configuration. Instead, effort must be made to work through every program individually, customizing its color scheme.

that's how it has always been. There isn't a system out there that does theming where some apps won't be left out. It's practically impossible. Even dark mode on iOS doesn't work on every app. And then there is Android... which is just unspeakably bad at all things UX.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#207

Post by cgrealy »

Is it possible that the reason for this is that the desktop simply isn’t that important anymore?

For a non-trivial number of people, a “real computer” (i.e. a laptop or desktop) is still just a web browser with a nicer way of typing.

People don’t care about customising their computers as much anymore because they have several devices and almost all of them are for accessing internet services (even “apps” are generally just an optimised UX for a web service).

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#208

Post by nickjj »

kube-system wrote: post #198
nickjj wrote: post #101

Back in Windows 98 you could set your title bar to be a gradient between 2 colors. That used to be a fun way to customize your look. How did we get into a world where 20 years later with Windows 10 you can't even set a dark title bar color because Windows will say "that color is not supported". There's a cut off when picking a custom color where if you go below a certain shade of darkness it denies you.

Text visibility? IIRC, Windows 9x would allow you set text and the background to the same color.

> Text visibility?

In this case disallowing a darker color creates less contrast and visibility because Windows will use white text behind it.

It's also one of those silly limits where one shade is allowed but then you make a 000001 adjustment to it and suddenly it's disallowed. It feels like an arbitrary decision to not let users pick the color they really want.

To me it feels like the complete opposite of user empowerment.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#209

Post by tokai »

gambiting wrote: post #84

It's truly shocking to me how few people even change their wallpaper. I work in a video games studio and like 90% of people have the default windows logo on blue background wallpaper. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice wallpaper, but people have their custom figurines and personal trinkets on the desks, but won't bother to change the wallpaper on their desktop.

It's shocking to me that anyone would chance the background on a work pc.

Re: Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

#210

Post by userbinator »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #175

Good Lord, just give me control over the appearance of scrollbars again. Was there some international UI/UX meeting where they declared a holy war on scrollbars? Seems like everyone is trying to make them disappear like they're an embarrassing and unwelcome distant relative they're passive aggressively trying to make go away.

Auto-hiding elements are one of the worst trends in "modern" UIs. I've had countless times where I had to waste a lot of effort trying to find controls that were hidden and only appeared if you hovered for long enough in the right place. It reminds me of this amusing comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293

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