Re: Colours!

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 13 September 2012 00:59, Dragan Dumeljic <dragan dumeljic gmail com> wrote:
> Kai Willadsen <kai.willadsen <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've just pushed a branch of Meld that reworks our colour handling. In
>> the past, we (very inconsistently) took colours from the preferences.
>> This didn't work very well, and many colours were hard-coded besides.
>>
>> The branch I've just pushed takes all colours from a gtkrc file. The
>> big advantage of this is that it allows theme authors (and
>> enthusiastic users) to tweak Meld's colour scheme to their liking. I'm
>> hoping that this will be a big plus for lovers of dark themes. Note
>> that directory and VC comparisons now use *blue* to indicate changed
>> files rather than red, which is now used for conflicts. This change
>> makes the meaning of colours consistent between folder, file and VC
>> comparisons.
>>
>> If you regularly use a dark GTK theme, please try out this branch!
>>
>> It will look just as bad at first, but tweaking the colours in
>> data/gtkrc should allow you to fix it better than you could
>> previously. If you find you can't make relevant changes, then please
>> let me know. Even better, if anyone wants to have a go at making this
>> work better out-of-the-box for dark themes, then please do.
>>
>> This isn't the end of colour-related changes. Meld's default colours
>> will get a bit of a facelift soon, including a likely change to inline
>> highlighting (no more red-on-blue!) and some additional tweaks (see
>> bug 671275 for one set of possibilities).
>>
>> cheers,
>> Kai
>>
>
> Hi,
>
> I am using CentOS 6 with Gnome 2 and my theme is dark. I use Shiki Colors Brave
> with custom background set to dark grey and my foreground is almost white.
>
> Until recently I was using Meld 1.5.3 with custom modified preferences.py that
> was not working very good; still better then nothing.
>
> I would like to help with this if I can, I do not speak Python ;-) should not be
> that difficult.
>
> Can you please point me in the right direction. I do not see your commit, after
> cloning the meld repository. There are overall only four branches. I do not see
> your commit from Sep 4.

Yeah, when I said I'd pushed a branch, I should have been more
specific. The code lived in a *local* branch, but is now in Meld HEAD,
so you should definitely get it if you clone the repository. The
commit series is still on the first page of:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/meld/log/  (starts with "Use gtkrc-set
symbolic colours for most drawing")

> A few words about how colors work, where are defaults
> and what is the idea would be very helpful.

The short version is:
 * Everywhere we draw custom colours, we use colours from gtkrc. There
are no more hard-coded colours.
 * We *don't* override default GTK colours (e.g., textview background)
for boring reasons, so some tweaking is still required for dark
themes.
 * All of the default colours are currently stored in Meld's
data/gtkrc file. If you clone and run Meld locally, any changes you
make to that file should show up. In addition, theme gtkrc files and
user gtkrc files should work; please let me know if they don't.
 * The colour names in data/gtkrc are pretty straightforward. *-bg are
used for file comparisons and side-bars in both file and folder mode.
*-outline are the same. *-text are used for VC and folder mode.

If anything isn't clear, please ask questions. I'll need to document
this eventually anyway.

cheers,
Kai