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>Hey guys, remember when you could just arbitrarily change the colors of UI elements across your entire OS and pretty much all of its applications without the r

by simias 7y ago

>Hey guys, remember when you could just arbitrarily change the colors of UI elements across your entire OS and pretty much all of its applications without the requirement of bespoke 'dark mode's? I certainly don't. Do you have a specific OS in mind? In my experience it worked as long as you only used applications that used the stock UI toolkit without customization. As soon as some app tries to use custom controls (or even just custom icons) it becomes messy, either because these controls won't apply the custom system theme and they'll stand out like a sore thumb or because they'll apply partially and make the control hard or impossible to see correctly. On Linux it's even worse because of the multiple UI toolkits/desktop environment available (GTK-gnome/Qt-kde/motif/wxwidgets/...) which often need to be configured independently from one another. And on top of that some applications like gvim, emacs, firefox or terminal emulators will have their own custom theme configuration that will override the global theme. I definitely understand why Apple thought it was a good idea to lock things up to give the user a consistent experience.

majewsky 7y ago
Circa 2008 I used KDE 4 with a dark UI theme (one of the predefined color schemes) and it worked perfectly in 99% of applications. Sure you have a few oddballs (cough Java cough), but all Qt-based or GTK-based apps adopted the colorscheme without any issues.
kevingadd 7y ago
Custom colors worked in the vast majority of the post-95 Windows apps I ever used. Some of them did custom theming that ignored system colors, but a lot of those had swappable themes so you could just get a custom theme that was dark. GTK and QT all typically obeyed Windows system colors when I used apps built with those. I don't know for certain that the JVM's UI toolkits obeyed them, but I'm pretty sure they did. The Windows "high contrast" accessibility mode relied on system colors so you would expect them to work. The modern hell era of 'every UI element is a png file' is specifically the fault of Apple who caused it (with iOS's gaudy visual style that could not be efficiently rasterized using vector graphics by the average developer) and reinforced it with the way they handled the introduction of Retina displays (adding specific tooling to support tons of massive resolution-specific pngs that developers then shipped in their apps) System colors were very easy to tap into using VB6, Delphi, VB.Net, C#, etc. If people weren't obeying system colors they just didn't care about obeying user intent or about helping people with visual impairment.
1MachineElf 7y ago
I had a great experience back on Windows XP & Vista using WindowBlinds[0][1] to give the entire system a dark, minimalist theme. There are examples[1][2][3] of 3rd party apps working well with the system-wide theme. [0] https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb5/ https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb5/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds
ChrisRR 7y ago
I'm fairly sure you could change every colour you wanted in Windows 95/98
basscomm 7y ago
> I certainly don't. Do you have a specific OS in mind? Windows from 1.0 - ME, for example, would let you customize the color, font, and size of just about any thing you wanted. Starting with Luna In XP and forward, you got a few choices of themes, but you weren't really able to change all the decorations to whatever you wanted. Windows 10, for example, won't let you change the color of the text in window title bars without hacking the registry
pc86 7y ago
Did you ever use earlier versions of Windows, up to and (I think) including XP?
- Jaruzel 7y ago
  If you turn off Windows themes in later version, the gui defaults back to an approximation of the Windows 2000 gui, and you can change all the colours accordingly.
runjake 7y ago
Let me introduce you to "Hot Dog Stand" in Windows 3.1. https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-hot-dog-stand-color-scheme/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho...

by simias 7y ago

majewsky 7y ago

Circa 2008 I used KDE 4 with a dark UI theme (one of the predefined color schemes) and it worked perfectly in 99% of applications. Sure you have a few oddballs (cough Java cough), but all Qt-based or GTK-based apps adopted the colorscheme without any issues.

kevingadd 7y ago

Custom colors worked in the vast majority of the post-95 Windows apps I ever used. Some of them did custom theming that ignored system colors, but a lot of those had swappable themes so you could just get a custom theme that was dark. GTK and QT all typically obeyed Windows system colors when I used apps built with those. I don't know for certain that the JVM's UI toolkits obeyed them, but I'm pretty sure they did. The Windows "high contrast" accessibility mode relied on system colors so you would expect them to work. The modern hell era of 'every UI element is a png file' is specifically the fault of Apple who caused it (with iOS's gaudy visual style that could not be efficiently rasterized using vector graphics by the average developer) and reinforced it with the way they handled the introduction of Retina displays (adding specific tooling to support tons of massive resolution-specific pngs that developers then shipped in their apps) System colors were very easy to tap into using VB6, Delphi, VB.Net, C#, etc. If people weren't obeying system colors they just didn't care about obeying user intent or about helping people with visual impairment.

1MachineElf 7y ago

I had a great experience back on Windows XP & Vista using WindowBlinds[0][1] to give the entire system a dark, minimalist theme. There are examples[1][2][3] of 3rd party apps working well with the system-wide theme. [0] https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb5/ https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb5/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds

ChrisRR 7y ago

I'm fairly sure you could change every colour you wanted in Windows 95/98

basscomm 7y ago

> I certainly don't. Do you have a specific OS in mind? Windows from 1.0 - ME, for example, would let you customize the color, font, and size of just about any thing you wanted. Starting with Luna In XP and forward, you got a few choices of themes, but you weren't really able to change all the decorations to whatever you wanted. Windows 10, for example, won't let you change the color of the text in window title bars without hacking the registry

pc86 7y ago

Did you ever use earlier versions of Windows, up to and (I think) including XP?

Jaruzel 7y ago
If you turn off Windows themes in later version, the gui defaults back to an approximation of the Windows 2000 gui, and you can change all the colours accordingly.

runjake 7y ago

Let me introduce you to "Hot Dog Stand" in Windows 3.1. https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-hot-dog-stand-color-scheme/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho...