Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C# • Hacker News Board

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#181

Post by liontwist » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 6:34 AM UTC

CRConrad wrote: post #176

Kwpolska wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me restate the problem: I set my system-wide window background to black and text color to white. An app developer sets a label to dark gray text and default/transparent background. The end result is that I cannot read the label. Or the developer uses black icons on the toolbar — and I cannot use the toolbar, because I can’t see anything. macOS introduced system-wide dark mode a few years ago, but app developers h…

> Let me restate the problem: I set my system-wide window background to black and text color to white. An app developer sets a label to dark gray text and default/transparent background. Yeah, that's a moronic developer. So what? Moronic developers have always existed, and still do. You can't blame toolkits or OSes for their existence. > Classic Win32 apps need to implement their own dark mode with custom themes/cont…

> Windows... at least as good as, possibly better than, any current Linux DE.

As a Linux enthusiast I agree. Microsoft built windows for utility, and did a lot of research to determine what worked. It took all the best ideas from other UI toolkits and refined them.

It's absurd that making a scrolling list of ~5000 items is a performance problem for modern applications when it's completely solved in Windows 95.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#182

Post by liontwist » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 6:38 AM UTC

CRConrad wrote: post #177

alkonaut wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black-on-black is a big problem. You can't make an app use a dark mode unless it's painstakingly crafted to support it. Only trivial apps would work by changing some system-wide palette. Also, if there is any artwork (button icons etc) then that has to be done in two or more sets, for varying backgrounds. Few icons would work well on both a light and dark background.

> Black-on-black is a big problem. You can't make an app use a dark mode unless it's painstakingly crafted to support it. Maybe not now, but back in the day, that was utter BS. You pretty mucch had to go out of your way not to have your app use whatever colour palette the user had decided on. Well, on Windows, at least. (And here I thought people used to brag about programming tools on Linux being better than on Wind…

What's still being missed from the discussion is that Motif allows per-app config, with queries that reach into the app's UI tree, and pick out individual elements.

A custom config can be made for each program to addresses all idiosyncrasies and that could be shipped with the distro as "dark mode" without any code change.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#183

Post by CRConrad » Tue, Dec 10, 2024, 7:43 AM UTC

liontwist wrote: post #182

CRConrad wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Black-on-black is a big problem. You can't make an app use a dark mode unless it's painstakingly crafted to support it. Maybe not now, but back in the day, that was utter BS. You pretty mucch had to go out of your way not to have your app use whatever colour palette the user had decided on. Well, on Windows, at least. (And here I thought people used to brag about programming tools on Linux being better than on Wind…

What's still being missed from the discussion is that Motif allows per-app config, with queries that reach into the app's UI tree, and pick out individual elements. A custom config can be made for each program to addresses all idiosyncrasies and that could be shipped with the distro as "dark mode" without any code change.

I don't think that was entirely missed: AFAICR, I pointed out somewhere that in that case, it's up to the app developer not to screw it up. If they set the foreground colour but not the background, or vice versa, they risk getting both so close to each other that the lack of contrast makes text illegible. This is so obvious that on such systems, the fault is totally with any app developer that does this.

Re: Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

#184

Post by CRConrad » Fri, Dec 13, 2024, 8:09 AM UTC

liontwist wrote: post #181

CRConrad wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let me restate the problem: I set my system-wide window background to black and text color to white. An app developer sets a label to dark gray text and default/transparent background. Yeah, that's a moronic developer. So what? Moronic developers have always existed, and still do. You can't blame toolkits or OSes for their existence. > Classic Win32 apps need to implement their own dark mode with custom themes/cont…

> Windows... at least as good as, possibly better than, any current Linux DE. As a Linux enthusiast I agree. Microsoft built windows for utility, and did a lot of research to determine what worked. It took all the best ideas from other UI toolkits and refined them. It's absurd that making a scrolling list of ~5000 items is a performance problem for modern applications when it's completely solved in Windows 95.

NB: "old Windows was far better at these things than ... any current Linux DE", where "these things" is explicitly the breadth of desktop UI user settings, and to a slightly lesser degree, applications respecting them. Not saying it is, or ever was, better at anything else.