This may end up in a totally different product, but it seems best to start here.


There's a popular idea that HighContrastInverse has been dropped, but that was only the GTK+ 2 theme.

In GTK+ 3, HighContrastInverse is generated from the same SASS as HC and is nearly totally identical, aside from the obvious of colours being inverted.

It's a nice theme, which provides high contrast but with the perk of not dazzling the user with pure white at all times - something I appreciate. More importantly than my sense of aesthetics - I'm sure the availability of a very dark theme is important for some users with specific sight requirements. For both reasons, I've tried to give it extra attention with my recent bugfixes.


Yet GNOME does not seem to provide any way to get to HCI. It doesn't show in Tweaks, either because it's a variant or it has no GTK+ 2 folder. And because its variant name is Inverse, the global dark theme setting doesn't switch to it.

An accessible theme should be... accessible. As in, capable of choosing it without needing to navigate the maze of dconf, or use an environment variable, the Inspector, custom theme with import from GResource, etc.


My first thought was to implement this as the :dark variant of HighContrast, and I'm curious why it wasn't that way already?

Anyway, it's pretty clear we don't want to go that route: the global dark theme setting is going away, to be replaced by a proper first-class theme. But for that to work for HCI, it'll presumably need its own directory to be installed.

So, it seems like something needs to be done either way to make HCI more easy for a user to select, without having to be aware of all the underlying settings.