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I've been a theme creator for a few decades now, and modifying how programs looked is what got me into development in the first place 30 years ago. The constant

I've been a theme creator for a few decades now, and modifying how programs looked is what got me into development in the first place 30 years ago. The constant stripping of user definable visuals in modern computing is a legitimately depressing thing for me to see happen. It's just another step along the "you don't own the device or the software, we're just letting you borrow it" path. The constant push with SAAS and cloud-based data and all the rest, just makes me think we're heading back towards a terminal/mainframe environment and soon we'll be "consuming" the Internet in the same way we consume interactive Cable TV.

HNthrow22 7y ago
agreed man, have fond memories of tweaking themes for daily drivers like irc client, winamp foobar2000, compared to like spotify or discord now feels so neutered and limited in terms of customizing appearance.
- ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
  Yeah and everything now is so disjointed. It shits me. Eg not only can’t you customise Spotify or Discord visually, but they don’t even respect the OS controls. You can’t resize them properly to fit windows 10 tiling, the menus are a broken mess, etc. They insist on doing everything themselves and ignoring all standards which just ends up looking ugly and broken. One of my main passions in theming is making your entire system look cohesively styled. Hell, I’d rather have standard Windows look but every program using the system UI so at least it all looks the same. I despise Spotify, Discord, and all Electron apps for this reason. They look so amateurish.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Same here. And it's not just theming. Windows has always had a lot of small, lesser-known conventions around UI elements, some accessibility features, and a way for additional software to hook up to the UI. None of that is respected when an application decides to draw its own UI on a canvas.
- nickjj 7y ago
  Yeah and with Windows 10 you can't even set the title bar color to be black unless you either download 3rd party tools or hack around in your registry. On the bright side, with native Linux you can customize everything. It's so fun to customize your window manager, status bar, etc. and have everything look and work exactly how you want.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
FWIW, one redeeming characteristic of SaaS web apps is that most of the time, you can fix up their crap UIs with liberal application of CSS (via e.g. Stylus extension). It's something I find myself doing increasingly often - usually not to make things look different, but to undo some dumb design decisions like low density, whitespace-rich presentation, or hidden video controls. Unfortunately, this does not give the ability to do system-wide restyling of the kind _trampeltier mentioned. Despite professions to the contrary, almost nothing whatsoever on the web is in any way semantic. Each website is its own assortment of CSS hacks hooked up to a tree of randomly nested, randomly named divs. You can't just write one style that says "please stop with the whitespace around media boxes", you have to unbreak each site individually, because a "media box" isn't really a website-independent thing, and neither is a button.
- anderspitman 7y ago
  Is there any sort of a "marketplace" where people can upload and vote on alternative CSS themes for any given site? That would be cool.
  - nvrspyx 7y ago
    An alternative to the Stylus extension that the parent comment mentions is the Stylish extension, which has a "marketplace" almost exactly what you're looking for. You don't even need the Stylish extension as each theme is also offered as a userscript. https://userstyles.org https://userstyles.org
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Yeah, there's that; I wasn't sure about affiliation status between userstyles.org and Stylish. FWIW, I still recommend installing Stylus instead of Stylish - the difference is that at some point, Stylish changed owner and acquired analytics; Stylus is a fork that's free of privacy-invading antifeatures.

HNthrow22 7y ago

agreed man, have fond memories of tweaking themes for daily drivers like irc client, winamp foobar2000, compared to like spotify or discord now feels so neutered and limited in terms of customizing appearance.

ObsoleteNerd 7y ago
Yeah and everything now is so disjointed. It shits me. Eg not only can’t you customise Spotify or Discord visually, but they don’t even respect the OS controls. You can’t resize them properly to fit windows 10 tiling, the menus are a broken mess, etc. They insist on doing everything themselves and ignoring all standards which just ends up looking ugly and broken. One of my main passions in theming is making your entire system look cohesively styled. Hell, I’d rather have standard Windows look but every program using the system UI so at least it all looks the same. I despise Spotify, Discord, and all Electron apps for this reason. They look so amateurish.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Same here. And it's not just theming. Windows has always had a lot of small, lesser-known conventions around UI elements, some accessibility features, and a way for additional software to hook up to the UI. None of that is respected when an application decides to draw its own UI on a canvas.
nickjj 7y ago
Yeah and with Windows 10 you can't even set the title bar color to be black unless you either download 3rd party tools or hack around in your registry. On the bright side, with native Linux you can customize everything. It's so fun to customize your window manager, status bar, etc. and have everything look and work exactly how you want.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

FWIW, one redeeming characteristic of SaaS web apps is that most of the time, you can fix up their crap UIs with liberal application of CSS (via e.g. Stylus extension). It's something I find myself doing increasingly often - usually not to make things look different, but to undo some dumb design decisions like low density, whitespace-rich presentation, or hidden video controls. Unfortunately, this does not give the ability to do system-wide restyling of the kind _trampeltier mentioned. Despite professions to the contrary, almost nothing whatsoever on the web is in any way semantic. Each website is its own assortment of CSS hacks hooked up to a tree of randomly nested, randomly named divs. You can't just write one style that says "please stop with the whitespace around media boxes", you have to unbreak each site individually, because a "media box" isn't really a website-independent thing, and neither is a button.

anderspitman 7y ago
Is there any sort of a "marketplace" where people can upload and vote on alternative CSS themes for any given site? That would be cool.
- nvrspyx 7y ago
  An alternative to the Stylus extension that the parent comment mentions is the Stylish extension, which has a "marketplace" almost exactly what you're looking for. You don't even need the Stylish extension as each theme is also offered as a userscript. https://userstyles.org https://userstyles.org
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Yeah, there's that; I wasn't sure about affiliation status between userstyles.org and Stylish. FWIW, I still recommend installing Stylus instead of Stylish - the difference is that at some point, Stylish changed owner and acquired analytics; Stylus is a fork that's free of privacy-invading antifeatures.