Provision of a light background theme for MuseScore 2

• Jul 1, 2013 - 10:23

There are a number of us who are unhappy with the proposed new dark theme for MuseScore 2, in my case because advancing decrepitude means my brain refuses to interpret the dark them as anything other than a negative image :(

So here is an opportunity to discuss alternatives, how they might link in with the existing design concepts, etc

There has already been some discussion on this:-

http://musescore.org/en/node/21048

There is also the beginnings of a discussion in a branch of this thread:

http://musescore.org/en/node/21692#comment-81734

Comments

• Jul 1, 2013 - 11:30

To continue the above discussion:-

I downloaded the source and even located the place I think needs to be edited for making color changes, so I'll wait until ChurchOrganist is back on line and can confirm that's the only place it needs to be changed and to what colors.

As an aside, it sort of looks (line 4669 etc of musescore.cpp in the code I just downloaded) like it's structured as if there might later be some way of loading different color schemes. Or did I read it too quickly? Do you know anything about that?
If so, it might be nice to get a couple UI experts to come up with a set of color options like : "cool," "traditional," and "for old cranky blind people like Frank."

As far as making colour changes is concerned, the information from the Developer Handbook on themes is:-

Some practical info:

Everything is in mstyle directory.
The css system which temporary was put in place in the master, only partly worked out. It has been removed again. So everything needs to be coded in C++.
An example of how theming is done: line 2341: “p.setColor”

However, the main code section in the mstyle directory only has 600 odd lines, and line 2341 in mscore.cpp doesn't contain a reference to p.setColor, indeed a search of mscore.cpp is blank for the strings "p.setColor", "setColor" and "Color".

The "native" theme is still selectable in the preferences dialogue, however, the only problem being that in the standard build the icons are white and so do not show up well unless selected.

I have been experimenting to see whether it's possible to produce coloured icons which are equally visible on the dark or native theme, but so far I have found that the shading process for selected icons darkens the icon too much in the dark theme. At first I thought the bits in the icons were being ANDed to produce shading but that now seems not to be the case.

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• Jul 1, 2013 - 12:09

Starting from ddbb8f5e70, the native theme is gone. There is now the choice between an dark and a light theme. The theme color scheme is mainly controlled by:
- the palette defined in mscore/musescore.cpp. The palette contains only a few colors. Other colors in the interface, gradients etc... are computed automatically from these values. The palette can be overriden by the preferences file in the general section.
- For some minor things (tooltip background, OS specific etc...), a CSS file embedded in the MuseScore binary

shot_130701_122520.png

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• Mar 27, 2014 - 13:24

There is now the choice between an dark and a light theme. … The palette can be overriden by the preferences file in the general section.

I prefer the dark theme for the lighter colour ‘comes out’ of the screen (for me it’s easier to, e.g., read something white on black than vice versa—this applies for icons, too, at least for me).
Now, I cannot find the switch to dark theme in Style | General… in a linux nightly build. Probably you talked about some other general section. Could you tell me, how to set it to dark theme?

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