theming questions

[Dirk Hohndel]

Sending the email below on Dec 25th likely guaranteed that no one would respond. :-/
I apologize for replying to my own message, but this is a topic that's rather significant for my project and I'd love to find a way to make this all work.

If there's a different mailing list I should use, please point me that way, or if I should talk to someone off list, I'll of course be happy to do that, too.

Thanks everyone and Happy New Year!

/D

> On Dec 25, 2020, at 3:19 PM, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
> 
> After spending some quality time with the documentation I could find (not a lot) and with the sample plugin that I was able to find (Noah’s qqc2-breeze-plugin) I’m not sure if I understand more or am more confused. :-)
> 
> I was able to build the plugin (that requires a lot of KF5 infrastructure, but for figuring out how this all is supposed to work I’m not too worried about that) and load the plugin, but then what do I do with it? Or asked differently, what do I get from having it?
> 
> Looking through the sources I can see that this would allow me to create templates for every graphical element - but when I played with that idea, I don’t think I was able to actually see the effect of it.
> 
> To test, I create a minimal app that created a QPluginLoader that then created an instance for that plugin (making sure that the loading of the .so was successful). And then created a Kirigami.ApplicationWindow with a Label inside. 
> Now I modified Noah’s plugin to make the label text yellow.
> Rebuilt, made sure the new one was loaded, ran my app... label isn’t yellow.
> 
> So I’m clearly missing “something”.
> 
> And also, I understood that somehow I can use that to set the desired colors in the Kirigami.Theme and that I couldn’t figure out at all. I can see the Theme.qml in the plugin, but not a C++ class that would allow me to set / propagate color changes.
> 
> So it’s possible I’m looking at the completely wrong plugin, or that I’m missing the obvious in how to use this plugin to do the thing I want to do :-)
> 
> I’d appreciate a few more pointers how to get from A to B.
> 
> (my guess is that most of you are away from your keyboards, enjoying the holidays... I should be doing the same, I guess :^] )
> 
> /D
> 
>> On Dec 23, 2020, at 15:00, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Nicholas,
>> 
>> Thanks for the response - you are aiming just outside of my level of 'full understanding' how all of this is supposed to work together :-)
>> 
>> 
>>> On Dec 23, 2020, at 12:34 PM, Nicolas Fella <nicolas.fella at gmx.de> wrote:
>>> The Kirigami.Theme that we have in QML is backed by the PlatformTheme class
>>> (https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/-/blob/master/src/libkirigami/platformtheme.cpp).
>>> It contains a plugin system that is responsible for loading the actual colors
>>> (https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/-/blob/master/src/libkirigami/platformtheme.cpp#L916)
>>> and a fallback implementation
>>> (https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/-/blob/master/src/libkirigami/basictheme.cpp).
>> 
>> Cool - that's a good place for me to start reading and understanding how this all fits together. So far it's been all "git grep" and trying to find something that I understand and that does what I want :-)
>> 
>>> The plugin is selected based on the QQC2 style, for example the
>>> implementation for qqc2-desktop style can be found at
>>> https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/qqc2-desktop-style/-/blob/master/kirigami-plasmadesktop-integration/plasmadesktoptheme.cpp.
>>> My suggestion would be to create your own color plugin and ship that
>>> with your app. That would allow you to define the various
>>> Kirigami.Theme.* values based on your own logic while not requiring any
>>> special QML code.
>> 
>> That definitely sounds like the right way to go.
>> 
>>> What QQC2 style do you use in your app? If you have
>>> your own anyway then it would be a matter of having a plugin with the
>>> right name in the plugin path and it would be selected. If not then we
>>> can talk about adding some API that allows selecting a specific color
>>> plugin.
>> 
>> I don't think we do (I know, terrible answer, showing that I'm not fully understanding the toolkit that I use for my app.
>> The main target platforms for the app are Android and iOS - but you can run 'mobile on desktop' both on Linux and Mac.
>> My guess is that QQC2 has a different style for each of these platforms.
>> 
>> I'll do some reading based on all the new information that you provided and see what I can figure out.
>> 
>> And of course -- always grateful for more pointers :-)
>> 
>> Thanks and happy holidays!
>> 
>> /D