All answers on similar questions talk about the editor's colors. The icls files you can download are also for the editor only. I would like to change the UI colors. The supplied Darcula scheme is the only dark one but it is unreadably with its light gray on medium gray text.
You can only do so by modifying the source code of Android Studio. The two currently available look & feels include a lot of custom painting, colors and icons, so it's not feasible to provide the possibility to customize them through the UI.
Related
I'm trying to make VS Code editor to look exactly like Visual Studio. I made sure the font settings are exactly the same, however text still renders differently in VS Code (it seems "lighter").
Is there any way to fix this issue?
In the image below the top text is copied from Visual Studio while the bottom one is copied from VS code.
I know the difference is subtle but is still pretty noticeable.
Font rendering in VSCode has been a reoccurring issue throughout a good portion of the editors life time. Font rendering, especially in portable GUI's, is affected by several different layers, for example:
Your Graphics Card can affect the way font is rendered (you can try adjusting the graphic cards settings manually).
Your Monitor, obviously, affects rendering. In fact your monitor has a huge impact. (Try playing with your Monitor's Settings)
The color settings that are offered by your OS may have an impact (often times the color settings are the same as the graphic card settings though. Which means you can just use your OS's GUI to adjust your cards settings in some cases (Not on Ubuntu though))_
Somethings are out of your control, like:
VSCode, it is written using Electron v6. Not only does Electron impact font rendering, but when VSCode switched it Version 6 a lot of people reported a decrease in the editors font rendering quality.
VSCode also implements Anti-Aliasing tools, but as far as I can tell, they auto configure, so you have no control over this. These tools are likely to be one of the biggest causes to the difference in rendering you see, between VS IDE & VS CODE. There is a tool however that may give you some control over the Visual Studio side of rendering that I share a link to below. And just as an FYI, the Anti-Aliasing that VSCode uses is called Sub-pixel Rendering, which is something that Visual Studio doesn't implement as far as I can tell.
The Area You Have the Most Control in:
There is ONE tool/thing that you have 100% control over, that also greatly affects font-rendering, and that is the font that you decide to use. When choosing a font, you have the choice of equipping an OTF, or a TTF. In my personal experience, OTF's render better 90% of the time. The difference is in how they are created.
TTF fonts are made using quadratic Beziers.
OTF fonts are made using cubic Beziers.
Links above are the same
Fonts use something called font-hinting
Font hinting. Essentially font-hinting is a list of instructions that dynamically changes the way a font is rendered, by using the rasterized grid background as a parameter. adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid. Choosing a quality font equipped with good hinting is critical for non-blurry readable text.
Many people choose font because like the way they look, or the italic version of the font they use is popular. When choosing a font, it is extremely important to choose, not the coolest one, but the one that renders with the highest quality, and is the easiest for you to read.
Well Rendering Fonts:
Not only are their fonts that render well, with ligature support, but the best rendering fonts are always free IMO. Bellow are Fonts that use font hinting and have top notch rendering abilities.
JetBrains Mono (JetBrain's Font & My Personal Favorite)
Cascadia Code (Microsoft's Programming Font from 2019)
Fira Code (Not that old, but not that new either. Is loved by many.)
Fira Mono (No Ligatures, Different Font than Fira Code)
Consolas (A classic)
Menlo (Another Classic)
The top 4 are at the top of the list because they receive updates ever few months. I don't think Menlo & Consolas receive regular updates, but they aren't left forgotten either, the are updated every year or two.
To finish with as solid of an answer as I can provide:
_"Getting VSCode to render like the Visual Studio IDE, is not something that you will probably get, with 100% satisfaction, getting an exact match with all of the different factors is just an extremely and possibly impossible thing to due. You can probably make the way the two pieces of software render, more a like, not in functionality, but in looks. It would probably help a great deal to make sure that everything that affects rendering is up to date, editor, IDE, fonts, tools, ect... From their you can try different versions, and see if maybe an older version of VSCode rendered in a way that is preferable to you. You should also play with your monitors settings. I have found that I can accomplish a great deal just through the buttons under the face of my monitor. Check Visual Studio for any rendering settings it might have, VSCode doesn't have much available, but maybe Visual Studio IDE does (I haven't used the IDE in 5 years so IDK if it does).
On a final note:
Their is one tool that could help you, I haven't used it, because it isn't for VSCode, it's for Visual Studio, but it might give you more control than you have now. The tool is called..."_
Text Sharp (Click Here to see it in the VS Market Place)
While developing a menubar app, I am having a hard time finding the preferred method for making the app actually look good. I would have thought that Apple controls would have essentially handled this for the most part, but it appears not.
What is the preferred method for making sure a menubar app looks good in both light and dark mode? Am I missing some control functionality that facilitates this more easily or do I need to manually detect the mode and modify controls appropriately?
I have a menubar app, and I didn't have to do anything to make it look good in the dark theme.
Light theme:
Dark theme:
The most important things you need to do are:
Use system colors (e.g., [NSColor textColor], [NSColor textBackgroundColor]. These automatically adapt with the various themes. See the Color and Typography section of Apple's OS X Human Interface Guidelines.
Use template images. These also adapt to color changes. See the System-Provided Images section of Apple's OS X Human Interface Guidelines.
It's worth noting that Apple has not made it easy to programmatically detect which color theme is running (there are some tricks, but I'm not aware of any sanctioned method). My sense is that they've done this intentionally, so developers don't do custom per-theme stuff. Using system colors and template images, you shouldn't have to.
Update:
Sample project here: https://github.com/zpasternack/MenuBarTest
Well, you haven't explain (or shown) in what way it looks bad. Probably, you are using a normal, non-template image for its icon. You should use a template image, which is an image whose only significant part is the alpha mask. You tell the system that it's a template image either by naming it with a "Template" suffix (e.g. "FooTemplate.png") or by calling -setTemplate: on it.
So I have been trying for a couple of hours to set a dark theme for Eclipse Juno, the blinding white in your face is very tiring and strains the eyes after a short time. I managed to find a theme that darkens eclipse but still a few problems remain.
See image
I have no control over the background color of the menubar. Is it possible to change it? I tried everything in Win7 "Window Color and Appearance" but aside from being able to change the fontsize of the window title the colors do not change.
I have no control over the fontsize used for the titles in the various view panels of Eclipse, like the projectexplorer or editor.
No control over scrollbar color.
These are minor issues but would make the end result of the themes so much better. Is it at all possible to do anything with any of those issues on Win7?
Does this help for item 2?
The font size for the view and editor titles can be changed in Preferences. Select General->Appearance->Colors and Fonts. In the panel on the right, expand 'View and Editor Folders' and select 'Part title font' then click the 'Edit...' button.
On this subject, this Eclipse Themes plugin is also worth a look:
https://github.com/jeeeyul/eclipse-themes/
This is an excellent article about Eclipse theming:
http://www.vogella.com/articles/Eclipse4CSS/article.html
As for the menubar and scrollbar, the aforementioned article states:
SWT currently has some limitations for styling. For example it is not
possible to style menus and table headers. In addition some platforms
do not allow the styling of certain widgets, e.g. the Button or the
ScrollBar widget.
In order to make these widgets fit nicely you can install custom Windows theme, such as this one: http://vi20rickrmetal12us.deviantart.com/art/Pre-Black-VS-for-Windows-7-180497508 (before you can install a custom theme, you have to patch your system with Universal Theme Patcher or similar tool).
I hit the same wall some time ago. I found this resources very useful at that point:
A eclipse 4 dark theme described in the blog post of its author. It can be downloaded from github here. You can see also the content of the code.
The home of various eclipse themes here.
Another stackoverflow quetion dealing with similar problems here.
Currently I am using InteliJ Idea with its darkula theme.
I think this is a very common problem, but I cannot find a suitable solution for me. As you all know, WP supports a dark and a light theme. The user can change the theme and there are ways to override his decision and to display everything in the color theme you've selected. However, I'm just trying to react to this two theme types and I want to display icons in the correct color.
If you use the Application Bar, you can select from many built in icons, which will be automatically inverted from light to dark and vice versa.
Why isn't there any support for normal images? For example: I want to display a telephone icon. I've picked one from the built in icons and copied it from the Microsoft SDK folder to the Image folder of my project. If the user uses the dark theme, everything will be fine because the white telephone icon will be visible on the black background. But if he switches to the light theme, the icon will be invisible because it is white on white.
I'm fully aware of the style resources for textboxes or background colors, which use the phone's accent or theme color. But why is it, that there is no support for simple icons which I added as Image to my XAML page?
Of course I could detect in the constructor of the page if the user is in dark or light mode. I would then load either a black or white version of the telephone icon. But this check will be done everytime I visit the page and slows everything down. It's also annoying to manually add the check for the theme each time I'm adding a theme aware image.
Is there any solution, which will work with XAML only? Or is at least easy to maintain? And why can't I use the built in images from the SDK right from the beginning? They are already available in dark and light versions and are already used in the application bar.
If you want the icon to function like in the actionbar, just be white (if dark theme) and black (if light theme) then you can add the image as an opacity mask to a rectangle, like this:
<Rectangle Fill="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}" Width="48" Height="48" >
<Rectangle.OpacityMask>
<ImageBrush ImageSource="/Images/my.icon.png" />
</Rectangle.OpacityMask>
</Rectangle>
Where my.icon.png is a white image, like those you can choose for the actionbar.
You could use vector graphics instead of bitmap icons and use a theme-aware brush to draw them.
If you want the App to respond to a switch of the theme you'll need to respond to it any way.
I added a property to the base class of my Views that returns the selected theme. That way I can use/bind to that value.
It is also possible to use a ValueConverter that turns a logical name of a resource into a name of a theme specific resource.
Edit
Have a look at this: Custom light/dark theme resources on Windows Phone 7
Detect the theme (Supporting dark and light themes gives the best solution for this, I think), and then set the image accordingly. If you do this a lot, a custom control where you can supply two image sources and the correct one gets used would be easy enough to create.
Edit: Here's another good article on this topic. New Screen Resolutions
You pick a White Foregrounded icon use it. It suits for both Light and Dark themes. Thats what I have been doing.
The Coding 4 Fun control toolkit includes a round button that mimics the application bar buttons, including updating the foreground color depending on the theme. The code is open source, so perhaps you might find an answer in there. Or, as a hack, you could use the RoundButton control, turn off the border, and not provide a Click event.
Is it possible to set the default color of an application?
The problem is I have custom backgrounds in my app. If I have the white theme selected it looks nice. When I select the dark theme I cannot read it.
Is there a way to set it for the whole application e.g. that it should be white, whatever the phone default theme is?
Just define your own color resources and use them on your elements where necessary. Here is an example how to do this. Defining one "default color" for the whole application is not possible as far as I know. It would be a rather obscure setting. Maybe property value inheritance comes close to what you mean.
By the way: please don't design overly bright applications which ignore my dark theme. It hurts my eyes.