Enhancing the colour schemes [was: Re: sane defaults (security icons)]

[Gábor Lehel]

With regards to hardcoded colors, please no. I've submitted a bug with
nice screenshots to illustrate the problem a while ago, here:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96145
A black screen is just *so* much easier on the eyes. Would be great if
it were usable as well.


On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 15:29:57 +0100, Anders Lund <anders at alweb.dk> wrote:
> On Monday 17 January 2005 14:41, Olaf Schmidt wrote:
> > [Anders Lund, Montag, 17. Januar 2005 14:00]
> >
> > > Sometimes the system colors just doesn't do. I recently added a feature
> > > to kate which shades the background of used documents in the Document
> > > List, so that it is easy to spot the most recent modified/viewed
> > > documents. I can't use system colors, because there is no colors that
> > > can safely fill the needs.
> >
> > I assume simply using the alternative list background colour doesn't work?
> >
> > We discussed a similar problem in this thread:
> > http://lists.kde.org/?t=110236765700005&r=1&w=2
> >
> > Maybe the solution found in that case would work for Kate as well.
> 
> The alternate color is usually very close to the background, which is not
> quite suitable in this case.
> 
> [...]
> 
> > > Likewise, the colors used for syntax highlight in kate can't use system
> > > colors, since there are simply not colors enough.
> >
> > This is why I suggested to enhance the colour schemes for KDE 4.
> > I know that there are good reasons for doing it this way in KDE 3.4.
> > I hope that we can find a better solution for KDE 4.0, though.
> >
> > Having to change the colours in most key KDE applications separately
> > doesn't really fit to the idea of having central colour schemes in
> > kcontrol. Of course we could add support for individual applications to
> > the metathemes, or at least to kpersonalizer, but the problem is that
> > such a solution would soon be out of date whenever there are changes in
> > applications.
> >
> > I think enhancing the colour schemes to include enough colours for these
> > situations would be a cleaner approach. How many additional colours do
> > you need for syntax highlighting?
> 
> We have a set of default styles, which might each have up to 4 colors. But we
> might be able to minimize the default needs to 1 color pr style and maybe
> minimize further, I'll have to look into that. Aditionally we use colors for
> various other highlighting needs such as bracket highlighting, marked lines
> etc. Maybe 12 colors for text styles. A color for bracket highlight, and
> colors for shading marked lines - there are 7 defaults. All in all i got to
> 20 colors. They are all in the editor, and could be reused for other
> purposes.
> 
> I suggest that KDE defines some funtionality colors, such as error, warning,
> information at least, which could be used in any application.
> 
> > > So we provide a default color scheme that works, and all the colors are
> > > configurable. We have support for color schemes, and disabling of using
> > > colors for syntax highlighting will be added, as well as a mechanism to
> > > import color schemes so that theme developers can provide kate color
> > > schemes as well.
> >
> > My suggestion of having one central colour scheme for all colours needed
> > in applications doesn't work, then this is indeed a good approach.
> >
> > > There are no hardcoded colors in Kate to my knowledge. If there is,
> > > file a bug report and I'll fix it.
> >
> > As far as I know all colours in Kate are configurable, so there are no
> > absolute accessibility problems with it. But one problem I found is that
> > once you define colours in Kate, it is impossible to bring it back into
> > "use system colours" mode without deleting the config file. Maybe this
> > has already been fixed in the meantime.
> 
> I think all the colors are editable, so that can probably still be improved.
> 
> > Do you think my suggestion of enhancing the colour schemes to include
> > enough colours for Kate and Kontact would work?
> 
> I think it would be cool, since it would allow better defaults and hopefully
> make theme authors happy ;) If we can define good rolebased colors, other
> applications can use them as well.
> 
> -anders
> --
> www: http://alweb.dk
> jabber: anderslund at jabber.dk
> 


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