Dark theme for Picard

flowingisart · January 10, 2020, 12:42am

Title pretty much says it all.

2020 is the year of dark themes for applications because getting blinded by white UI’s is so pre-2020.

This not a demand; only a humorous suggestion.

Cheers!

psychoadept · January 10, 2020, 4:04am

I have totally wished for this, though.

Algwyn · January 10, 2020, 8:25am

It would be great indeed …

outsidecontext · January 10, 2020, 9:47am

But it is still a serious request I actually looked into this a few weeks ago, because we have an open feature request to support this on macOS. For macOS I actually had it run in dark mode locally, but our official builds don’t support it yet. For Windows 10 we’ll need to tweak the color palette.

For macOS there is a ticket for this:

And I added one for Windows 10:

On Linux one can already force the use of a different Qt theme by setting the QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE environment variable. For your enjoyment below is a screenshot of Picard running on Linux KDE Plasma with the dark Breeze theme:

MetaTunes · January 10, 2020, 10:00am

That looks way more sophisticated - especially for a music app.

Algwyn · January 10, 2020, 11:37am

It would be great if this could be put in official builds … (I’m a Mac user )

outsidecontext · January 12, 2020, 10:47am

If it would only be an option to enable on the build servers I would have already done. But actually this is supposed to already work, but it doesn’t for some reason unknown to me. As soon as I figure it out I will enable it.

hiccup · January 15, 2020, 4:43pm

I am not familiar with W10’s ‘dark mode’, but I am a big fan of dark themes in applications.
How would this work for W10? Could you set Picard to use a dark theme independently, or would you need to set W10 to a dark theme, and would Picard then follow?

(I would hope for the first)

psychoadept · January 15, 2020, 6:00pm

Agreed, I hope it could be set independently (although I do run W10 in dark mode)

hiccup · January 15, 2020, 6:11pm

I don’t, because I don’t like all aspects of it and I have done some other tweaks.
So I am hoping for an independent setting in Picard that will be ignorant of Windows 10 ‘App’ settings.

ecceccecc · April 28, 2020, 12:33am

Hey, how do I do this with Picard 2.31 running under Ubuntu 20,04 LTS with the default GNOME interface?

ecceccecc · April 28, 2020, 1:11am

UPDATE: I found out how to do it: installed adwaita-qt then did this:

echo "export QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=Adwaita-Dark" >> ~/.profile

and restarted session. Now I have not only Picard, but all QT5 apps in a good dark view. My eyes are thankful

ocor61 · September 19, 2020, 11:52pm

@ecceccecc I also downloadd adwaita-qt and installed it, then added that same line to ~/.profile, eagerly restarted my session and… nothing happened. Picard is still all light and hurting my eyes. Does anyone have a suggestion?
I also tried kvantum, but that doesn’t work for me either. I am running Linux Mint 19.3 with the Cinnamon DE.

ecceccecc · September 20, 2020, 12:31am

At least it works under GNOME - under Cinnamon I never tried

hiccup · January 2, 2021, 7:20am

Is there a way to force Picard using the dark theme without having your Windows 10 in dark theme?

Deleted_Editor_2136044 · January 2, 2021, 1:02pm

AFAIK, not yet. If you’re running from source, the magic happens in this function

github.com

metabrainz/picard/blob/master/picard/ui/theme.py#L109


if IS_WIN:
    import winreg
    class WindowsTheme(BaseTheme):
        def setup(self, app):
            app.setStyle('Fusion')
            super().setup(app)
        @property
        def is_dark_theme(self):
            dark_theme = False
            try:
                with winreg.OpenKey(winreg.HKEY_CURRENT_USER, r"Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Themes\Personalize") as key:
                    dark_theme = winreg.QueryValueEx(key, "AppsUseLightTheme")[0] == 0
            except OSError:
                log.warning('Failed reading AppsUseLightTheme from registry')
            return dark_theme
        @property
        def accent_color(self):

Forcing it to return ‘True’ forces the dark theme

dark_theme = True  # insert this line
return dark_theme

hiccup · January 2, 2021, 1:53pm

Thanks, but I don’t know what that means.
I am using portable installs. Can it be done with those?

Deleted_Editor_2136044 · January 2, 2021, 2:05pm

Oh, my bad. Source = source code, basically downloading the repository in the link, installing python and other dependencies and launching Picard from the terminal/console. You have full access to modify the program.

I don’t think so.

hiccup · January 6, 2021, 10:18am

Thnx.
Since Picard has a very active ‘making dreams come true’ developer ( @outsidecontext ) , let’s hope a manual setting for dark theme can be implemented some day.

(not saying the other developers of Picard aren’t active

outsidecontext · January 6, 2021, 11:10am

I’m not too keen on implementing this to be honest, mostly because of how this would work cross platform. But yes, maybe have this for Windows only. In general this theming is handled by Qt, the UI library being used. So there are different cases how this currently works:

On macOS the OS tells the app that dark mode is enabled. Qt already detects this and switches the colors accordingly (respecting e.g. the highlight color the user chose in the OS’s settings). From Picard’s perspective we have not much impact on this, except that we can detect that we are running in dark mode and adjust some colors accordingly (1).
On Linux depending on the desktop environment in use there is either no dark mode supported or the systems sets a specific color palette and Qt uses this. There is also the Picard option for the user to choose to use the system’s theme (this option is not available on macOS or Windows), which might or might not be dark. We don’t have a direct way to detect if the current theme is considered dark or not, but we check for the background color of the theme to decide on some colors to switch.
On Windows Qt has no built-in support for any dark theme handling. Hence we have implemented switching the color palette ourselves (it either uses the default palette of Qt for light theme, or a custom dark palette which was designed to match the colors used by Windows 10).

We could add the dark mode switch option maybe for Windows only, as it would be rather easy to support there. For the Linux case I would not do it, that would require us to define both a dark and light palette hard coded and use that, overwriting what was provided by the system. Considering how different the visuals is there and the Linux user’s desire to use their preferred look and feel across apps this complicates things. For macOS it is similar, we would need to both define a dark and light palette (that fits the default) and make sure it does not interfere with Qt’s own color switching.

Update: I added https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-2095

(1) Side note: macOS users will rightly notice that it does not work that way at all and Picard has no dark mode support on macOS at all. That’s also true, and it is because macOS thinks our packaged builds are not supporting dark mode. That’s a open problem to solve. But it works as described if one runs e.g. Picard from source.