Re: [Gimp-gui] GIMP Theme UI now and future.

[Elle Stone <ellestone ninedegreesbelow com>]

On 12/29/2015 03:53 PM, Jehan wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2015-12-29 21:14, Elle Stone wrote:
> > The Gray and Light themes are both very nice, and both seem to run
> > just fine on Gentoo Linux, as does the (far too dark for my
> > preferences) "dark side of GIMP" theme.
>
> Which Desktop/Windows manager, please? We had some issues when testing
> on KDE for instance so that's important information. :-)

I use IceWm.

> Which light theme are you refering to? The light (bug 759648) or
> alternate lighter one (bug 759830)?

Ah, I overlooked "the light side of GIMP" - that's nice! - not as light 
as the Lighter theme, very close to the current default GIMP theme in 
tonality.

> I personally prefer the lighter one and thought that the first one was a
> little too much on the grey side. I don't think we will ship both, so
> we'd have to decide.
> My idea is that if we provide a light, a grey and a dark one, it makes
> sense that the "light" one is really light.

For quick comparison, this screenshot shows darktable (very dark), 
RawTherapee (middle dark), Krita's darkest theme (about as dark as 
RawTherapee), and the GIMP "Dark side" (as dark as darktable), plus 
GIMP's "Sea of Gray" themes: 
http://ninedegreesbelow.com/bug-reports/gimp29/dark-themes.jpg

This screenshot shows GIMP's "Sea of Gray", "Light" and "Light side of 
GIMP" themes, along with Krita's Neutral theme and one of Krita's two 
lightest themes: 
http://ninedegreesbelow.com/bug-reports/gimp29/middle-grey-light-themes.jpg

Krita's five themes range from as dark as RawTherapee's theme to as 
light as the "light side of GIMP" themes, which is to say not quite as 
light as the GIMP Light(er) theme.

> > If I had to use GIMP in single window mode (something I never do),
> > with the Light theme I'd use the "dark check" (middle gray) background
> > option, which is very close to what Krita uses as the background for
> > the Krita "bright" theme.
>
> Are you suggesting we could use this same middle gray colour for one of
> the theme?

"The Sea of Gray" theme is already very close to middle gray. But middle 
gray might make a good default image background color for when GIMP is 
in SWM.

On the one hand, editing GIMP theme gtkrc files to change theme colors 
isn't all that difficult. On the other hand, many people will never edit 
a config file. Would it be too much to offer five default themes, more 
or less spaced as follows?

1. Very dark ("Dark side of GIMP" / compare to darktable's default theme)
2. Medium dark (compare to RawTherapee's default theme and Krita's 
darkest theme, for people who like "dark but not that dark")
3. Middle gray ("Sea of Gray" / compare to Krita's Neutral theme)
4. Medium light ("Light side of GIMP"/ compare to Krita's two lighter 
themes)
5. Very light (the Lighter theme from bug 759830, or depending on 
feedback from people who prefer very light themes, maybe a touch lighter?).

> > Whoever drew the new monotone icons, they are *very* nice. Though in
> > some ways I find the old icons with color a bit easier to look
> > at/recognize, possibly only because I've looked at them for so long.
>
> Icons were originally by Jakub Steiner and Barbara Muraus, from an icon
> set called "Art Libre".
> And a contributor (Klaus Staedtler) completed the missing icons (as of a
> few minutes ago, all the color icon set have a symbolic equivalent,
> though some places still use the desktop theme, which may change soon).
>
> I agree though that I have a hard time with the symbolic icons, but it
> may also be because I was just so used to the color ones as you point out.

> > Using Preferences to change from one theme to the next several times
> > in a row makes the Toolbox get one icon narrower each time a different
> > theme is selected.
>
> are you really saying that each time
> you switch themes, you get X, then X-1, then X-2, then X-3, and so on
> tools in the toolbox?
> Because I can't reproduce this.

As I switch themes, each time the toolbox gets one icon narrower, but 
this doesn't start happening until I've switched themes several times, 
not sure what triggers it.

> If that's only about the size of the icons, then there may be soon an
> option to choose icon size whatever the theme instead of having it
> hardcoded in themes: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745835

That would be very nice!

Elle