GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 688110
Could allow choosing the non-neutral color of the default theme (currently blue)
Last modified: 2018-05-02 15:33:38 UTC
Created attachment 228732 [details] Color customization in Gnome Shell. All agree that personalization and consistency are two things very important to the user experience in an interface? I believe that Gnome Shell is getting more consistent (and easy, and beautiful) with each release. But I can not say the same about personalization, of course. So, I would propose a way of Gnome Shell becomes more customizable without losing its consistency: allow the user to change the default color of the system - that blue. Please SEE THE ATTACHMENT for details. If anyone is interested, I'd love to explain it better, and do more examples. NOTE: make it clear that I am not talking about themes, nor about a change of layout!
(In reply to comment #0) > All agree that personalization and consistency are two things very important to > the user experience in an interface? No, not all agree. The color is part of branding, I guess. This sounds more like something that you could influence via writing a theme?
Hey Diogo, We've discussed adding the ability to set a color tint in the past, but nothing came out of it. Personalisation is an important part of the experience, of course, the only question is whether this is a) a good way to personalise and b) whether it is practical. My personal feeling is that System Settings is already rather full, and I'm not sure how much this feature would get used. Anyway, this is more of a theme/system settings bug, so I'll reassign.
CC'ing some shell peeps, since this concerns them too.
I think some form of personalization is very important. Since we took away fonts, I think colors would be simple and fun. For 3.8, this could be achievable with a simple palette of good-looking colors, I think, and not allowing the user to choose a generic color, simply to ensure that the combination of colors looks OK and we don't have unreadable text or otherwise. I don't know all the places that we use the blue color right now -- I can think of switch widgets, checkboxes, sliders. Can anybody think of more?
(In reply to comment #4) > I think some form of personalization is very important. ... Currently, the forms of personalisation that we provide out of the box are: * wallpaper * avatar * apps Then, for the more adventurous, there is the Tweak Tool and Extensions.
(In reply to comment #5) > Currently, the forms of personalisation that we provide out of the box are: > > * apps What's "apps"?
(In reply to comment #6) > What's "apps"? Install/remove applications, add applications to the dash.
(In reply to comment #1) > No, not all agree. The color is part of branding, I guess. > This sounds more like something that you could influence via writing a theme? I think the "branding" of Gnome is expressed more by design than by color. As the idea is NOT to change the design, I believe that Gnome does not lose its identity. At the same time, the Gnome uses three main colors: black, white and blue. How are black and white "neutral", would change only one color - the blue (exactly the one that has more psychological burden). And do not think that is the case for a theme because of the simplicity (without breaking design) and importance (customization - psychology) of change.
(In reply to comment #4) > I don't know all the places that we use the blue color right now -- I can think > of switch widgets, checkboxes, sliders. Can anybody think of more? Active scrollbars. Also, I think it makes a lot of sense *not* to expose different themes for WM-decorations, WM-chrome and Toolkit, so if we want to offer some simple color customizations, we should apply them to some GTK+ elements as well (same widgets as mentioned, plus "active-tab-marker", text selection (that one's risky, so maybe not), probably others ...)
(In reply to comment #2) > ...the only question is whether this is a) a good way to personalise and > b) whether it is practical. I think it's a great way to customize because: the colors have a strong psychological influence on people. That is, people (to change details for your preferred color) will feel more comfortable, unique, happy, etc.. I think it is very practical because, after all, are just color changes. > My personal feeling is that System Settings is already rather full, and I'm not > sure how much this feature would get used. The way I imagine it would be very simple: rename the GCC item "background" to "customize" (or any other word better), and put the color change option next to the wallpaper change option. Can I make a mockup if you (or anyone else) is interested. I also have a mockup ideia for the "Initial Setup". And of course, I believe that this will be used a lot. As far as the exchange of wallpaper, and for the same reasons: to have a "more my way" system, without "breaking" anything. > Anyway, this is more of a theme/system settings bug, so I'll reassign. Thank you, Allan!
(In reply to comment #4) > I think some form of personalization is very important. Since we took away > fonts, I think colors would be simple and fun. For 3.8, this could be > achievable with a simple palette of good-looking colors, I think, and not > allowing the user to choose a generic color, simply to ensure that the > combination of colors looks OK and we don't have unreadable text or otherwise. Exactly what I was thinking. Basically: 1 - Choose some good colors (such as the colors of the rainbow?). 2 - Paint the main theme with the colors chosen (by people who understand of design, of course.). 3 - Allow the user to choose between color variations of the same (beautiful, awesome and "only necessary") theme.
Theming wise that sort is simple customization is quite problematic still. At the moment we have a lot of app specific css, not only in adwaita but even shipped by apps (see boxes, or even hardcoded see gedit), which makes things quite difficult. I think offering that sort of customizability is quite important, but I'll defer it after gtk has the needed feature to avoid all the special casing we're currently doing.
Hi, if I'm not being annoying: is there any update on this subject?
Created attachment 297613 [details] GTK colors example I made this for fun, using the Tango color palette. What do you think? Desirable? Since the GTK's theme is now in CSS, I think this could be applied with something like this: /* THEME COLORS */ selector { property: #defaultcolor; } .color-1 selector { property: #color1; } .color-2 selector { property: #color2; } .color-3 selector { property: #color3; } .color-4 selector { property: #color4; } .color-5 selector { property: #color5; } .color-6 selector { property: #color6; } (a mailing list is better do discuss such things? Which one?)
Created attachment 297616 [details] GTK colors example (enhanced) Previous was in potato quality, sorry!
Lapo, above, is here to discuss.
Created attachment 307323 [details] [review] Tentative implementation of a green version of Adwaita. WARNING: Do not merge. Experimental. Not tested. How do I test this? I'm completely lost. How do I apply the results of this patch on a running system? (Fedora 22, specifically). Where do I put the CSS? Do I change something in "gsettings"? What?
With the theme written in sass, I think we can hide the added complexity outside the "meaningful" parts of the theme (_common.scss), so we can try something. Having a freely customizable color would be problematic since I won't know its luminosity in advance, but maybe we could provide a set of previously picked colors to choose from as Diogo proposed, not sure how that choice could be dealt with technically, maybe a style class on the toplevel or some other ways gtk+ hackers could figure out. The problem of app shipped css remains, but ideally that shouldn't touch regard this stuff. A control panel for this is also needed, but I'd really like to provide this kind of customization to our users, shall we try to tackle this for 3.20?
I'm not necessarily against this, but I would like to make sure that it fits with our long-term plans. In particular: * How will it align with application identity? Would it be better to vary the highlight colour (if that's the right term) per app? * What's our thinking for use of colour more generally? Up until now we've been quite conservative in this respect, but maybe it's time to rethink. * How would the settings fit in with a redesigned control center? I'm asking this because these are areas that I would like to address soon anyway. The proposal in this bug could fit well into our plans, but we should probably explore the options before committing to anything.
With Benjamin boxes work landing it *should* be possible to change the font w/o breaking the theme, so that's another customization option we could provide, which could fit the same eventual control panel, which could be aggregated with the background chooser probably. About the use of this color I'm thinking in term of what we have now so a general accent color, If we're going the google way with coloring apps differently this setting makes no sense.
(In reply to Diogo Campos from comment #17) > How do I apply the results of this patch on a running system? (Fedora 22, > specifically). > > Where do I put the CSS? Do I change something in "gsettings"? What? You should be able to test by putting the CSS files into ~/$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gtk-3.0/
> You should be able to test by putting the CSS files into > ~/$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gtk-3.0/ Thank you.
We're moving to gitlab! As part of this move, we are moving bugs to NEEDINFO if they haven't seen activity in more than a year. If this issue is still important to you and still relevant with GTK+ 3.22 or master, please reopen it and we will migrate it to gitlab.
Still something we might want to do.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/409.