elfmz
Configurable UI themes in a human-readable format
Quite a lot of users would love to customize the colors of the software they use, or to be able to install existing themes. The current "registry" storage format is a huge roadblock for it.
Could the color schema be stored somewhere in .config/far2l/theme.ini or something .config/far2l/themes/current.ini? #400 has a few wishes for the hypothetical format:
- Human-readable palette storage format.
- Different color palettes:
- variants of 16 ANSI colors (usable in tty mode);
- 256-color palettes (usable in other ttys too);
- TrueColor/RGB palettes;
The current color setup UI was nice for its time, but it's soooo dated.
I hope this is not an exact duplicate, as #400 primarily talks about switching color schemes.
Related: #846 has a point too. User menu is a relatively simple structure and could benefit from being stored in an ini file: for example, for an easier migration between computers.
That's cool! But it only sets the 16 base "ANSI" colors. What I mean by "theme" is a configuration that sets colors of things like:
- panel/command line/menu/dialog/controls/keybar/errors text and background colors (maybe underline and what else as well?);
- file highlighting schema for this particular theme.
Currently, we cannot control which is which if two UI elements share the same color.
After configuration is moved from "pseudoregistry" to .ini files, should this issue be renamed to "Expand supported colors range" or something like that? :)
Maybe. I thought the current title covers it, bit it's a bit vague now. The current wording also implies unification of file highlight and UI colors, and a rework of a binary values into a more human-readable format.
My bad!
The format I mean is something that lets us define a palette, and then use its colors for both UI and file highlights. Any software problem can be solved with a new level of indirection!
Here's a raw idea:
# Arbitrary color aliases
[Palette.24bit]
# Supposed red
Warning=#ee0000
# Supposed panel background
Background=#0000dd
SunsetWithAShadeOfSadness=#f37588
...
[Palette.256color]
# https://jonasjacek.github.io/colors/
# Refer by XTerm number for red
Warning=9
# Refer by XTerm name
Background=Blue3
...
[Palette.16color]
# See https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/438357/54895 for xterm color ids, I guess?
Warning=9
Background=Blue
NormalText=6
...
[Palette.8color]
...
[Palette.2color]
...
# Now, use the aliases to define UI colors.
[WarnDialog]
Text=White
Box=Warning
...
[Panels]
Background=Background
...
palette.cpp already has a few sections that would map neatly into ini sections.
The current colors.ini is great; I would only change xxxColor= fields from 0..15 indexes to a color aliases.
#400 in such a design would only need to swap existing ini files.
I guess that such ini files don't even need to be written by Far. I guess the whole color customization UI can be dropped. Otherwise, this would require a UI to configure RGB/256-color palettes, and that's an unnecessary work.
Here's a raw idea:
As a developer of the first (and possible only) far2l UI theme, I greatly support this idea. Also 24 bit color support will allow us to have pretty image previews in terminal https://github.com/elfmz/far2l/issues/901#issuecomment-770232384
As I see, there is 24bit support now. So it would be great to implement some predefined themes! I myself prefer white terminal background...
