On Dark Desktops ....

When history looks upon dark themes people will find the current discussion on Planet GNOME as the definative source of the awesomess. (Ironically, they'll be forced to weed through a bunch of emo stuff about some stupid stuff no one cares about, but that's beside the point.)

I am convinced that every LUG/LoCo has a "dark theme guy". You know the type, he sits in the back. For years, we made fun of that guy, and his stupid theme. "Haha, jerk, what are you, NEO?!?!"

But you know, black themes are the new black. Locally, michigan!/usr/group's Flavio daCosta has been our "black theme guy" for about 3 years or so. I know a bunch of us who tried the black theme thing for a while, but it never really worked out. He's one of the ones that sat in the back and patiently plotted our demise.

Just recently a bunch of us started using black themes, (for the win), and Flav's been aware of lots of issues with using dark themes. Luckily, things are much better now, before there were lots of icons in the notification area that sucked, etc. etc.

In fact, the only serious problem right now seems to be browser issues. Would someone from epiphany care to comment on this? I know you can do a custom epi stylesheet (thanks jimmac),

body {
background-color: #fff !important;
color: #000 !important;
}

but what about something slick ootb?

Comments

[foo]

For epiphany, I prefer to use:

user_pref("browser.display.use_document_colors", false);

In ~/.gnome2/epiphany/mozilla/epiphany/prefs.js

[Martijn]

But then you lose _all_ document-set colors.

What would be better (imho), would be to automatically set the foreground color to a color that contrasts with the background color (or the other way around) if only one of the two is explicitly set.

[Jakub Steiner]

Maybe my suggestion wasn't ideal. In most cases, website stylesheets only lack a definition of a background-color expecting white to be the default. I'm guessing the user stylesheet gets overriden by the page-specific one. So setting "body { background-color: #fff }" will solve the problem of having darkish background when the web designer forgot to explicitly set white background. One day I should actually try things before sggesting them. Next time :)

[Wolfger]

Dark themes FTW! I love dark themes, but they are often rendered unusable by poor programming practices. Every time a programmer half-heartedly follows the system color scheme, dark themes break, because every programmer assumes the default of a light color scheme. My most recent attempt at going Dark was foiled by the ScribeFire extension for Firefox. That was programmed poorly in more ways than one. In one area the program accepted the system color for the font, but not the system color for the background. This left me with a white-on-white text entry field. Then on the other hand there was an area where the program accepted the system color for the background, but not for the text. Black-on-black. I screamed. I searched for a way to submit a bug report. I sent polite e-mails. I gave up in despair and went back to a cruddy light theme, because ScribeFire has become one of my "can't live without it" applications.

[troll]

Nice, except that for usability you should tint the black towards white and vice versa. The reason is the contrast. On modern displays it is way past what is good for eyes and against good usability. Slightly heavier font and grayish theme is best for it.