Re: System-wide dark mode

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan vanberkom codethink co uk>]

    I've been meaning to reply somewhere in this thread... I am a user
of the dark theme via the tweak tool.

In the GNOME 2 days, we did some effort in Glade to ensure that we were
compatible with HCI themes (high contrast invert as we called them), as
I recall we also ensured on a GNOME wide level that our icons were
compatible with HCI themes - likely many GTK+ apps ported forward from
the GNOME 2 days will already work well out of the box with a dark
theme due to previous efforts.

While I did not use the HCI themes back then, I really like the dark
theme that I have been using with GNOME 3.

On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 07:46 -0500, mcatanzaro gnome org wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 5:40 AM, Allan Day <aday gnome org> wrote:
> > If the size of the theme is the issue, do we know what size is 
> > acceptable?
>
> For WebKit to be able to handle this, the required performance 
> improvement would be measured in orders of magnitude. I don't know 
> about Firefox.
>
> Without changes in GTK to allow us to use multiple themes at once, or 
> instantaneously switch between themes, we can either give you broken 
> dark mode (the status quo in both WebKit and Firefox), or we can give 
> you light mode (my recommendation).

Are you saying that WebKitGTK interprets the system theme and CSS to
render the HTML content ? This does seem a bit unintuitive to me for
web content, but I suppose it is useful for cases where apps want to
embed HTML that they themselves control.

That said, as a dark theme user I doubt that having the web browser
(which I usually put fullscreen anyway) being in light mode is going to
stop people from using a dark theme.

Anecdotally, currently my biggest issue with the dark theme is that
receiving HTML emails is even more of an annoyance, as I get a flashy
attention grabbing white background in Evolution for any HTML email:
Even though it annoys me a lot, it's not enough for me to switch to a
light theme.

Cheers,
    -Tristan