Re: GUIs are turning into seas of grey (gnumeric)

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Sat 09 Feb 2019 at 07:03:50 (-0500), Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Saturday 09 February 2019 03:18:43 Paul Sutton wrote:
> > On 09/02/2019 08:11, Brad Rogers wrote:
> > > On Fri, 8 Feb 2019 21:38:30 -0600
> > > David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hello David,
> > >
> > >> I can't understand why modern GUIs are composed of grey20 widgets
> > >> on a grey21 background.
> > >
> > > Fashion.  Pure and simple.
> > >
> > > It's ludicrous, I agree;  We finally have near photo-realistic GFX
> > > systems, and UI designers decide the best way to use them is to make
> > > everything monochrome.
> >
> > I have made GUI applications in Tkinter and agree,  buttons are grey, 
> > and yet dialog boxes can have a number of icons in them, for warning, 
> > information,  in a mix of colours for example Yellow, red or green
> > depending on the context.
> >
> > I am not sure if it is possible to add colour to the buttons,  I will
> > look in to it.  However there should be an agreed convention otherwise
> > an application with several buttons .   We should consider
> > accessibility on this.

If you're actually coding in (or have the code to) Tkinter, it can be
as easy as changing, say, a line like

    Tkinter.Button(xbar, text = 'Exit', command = self.quit
                   ).pack(side = 'right')
to
    Tkinter.Button(xbar, text = 'Exit', fg = 'red', command = self.quit
                   ).pack(side = 'right')

if the colour is static.

> As another gui builder, in this case for LinuxCNC,  the ability to add a 
> color to a button background could save a considerable amount of screen 
> real estate simply because the button could then be its own tally. 
> Having to compose an underlining led serving as the tally, takes a 
> minimum of 6 lines of vertical real estate, and a text button demanding 
> around 3x the height of the text is also a huge wasted space, 1 line 
> above and 1 line below the height of the font would be a great plenty. 
> I've looked at the srcs but don't know enough of that code language 
> to "fix" it. But I'd sure be greatfull to anyone who could fix it.

But here it's likely the GUI has been built with some IDE which can
make the actual code look much more complicated.

As an aside, searching through the stretch Packages file with

/^Package: .*theme

looking for gtk themes, I happened to pass by hits like
chameleon-cursor-theme and dmz-cursor-theme. So I installed these
and found it very simple to drop

export XCURSOR_THEME=DMZ-White XCURSOR_SIZE=64

into .xsession and get nice chunky cursors.

(I also learned something about who "owns" the cursor as you move it
around on the screen and applications.)

Cheers,
David.