Adhere to the OS/DE's colour scheme.
As aforediscussed at:
...I believe that Blender should, ideally, adhere to the application style (in my case, the
QStyle
), but understand that this is difficult for a custom, cross-platform GUI like Blender's.
Consequently, adhering to merely the Qt or GTK colour schemes (the
QPalette
s or CSS3 definitions) would be a significant improvement on Linux, whereas Windows > 10 exposes colour values for non-WinUI applications via the Registry, as macOS does for all applications.
The reason that this matters is that some people have their colour scheme change based upon the time of day and/or ambient light value, which Blender cannot adhere to. This is most problematic when using a somewhat dark display outside, in bright sunlight.
Additionally, although less of a concern due to its unchanging nature, its current inadherence to high contrast themes isn't much of a positive for accessibility. Some DE themes provide better WCAG AA adherence.
11 Comments
Skimming through the topics you listed, it looks like the reasons are pretty debated there already.
I think they just want one more option. When you don't have a favorite theme, it might be a good idea to fall back to the system classic theme.
System classic theme=No theme ----hahaha:)
Sure enough, but adding an option to follow or not the system theme isn't a magic solution to solve the issues mentionned.
@lauloque, hopefully the updated issue description provides a better idea of what this would solve. I've narrowed the scope of the request.
Edit: Sorry for the long read, I suck at making things short and concise.
Harley's comment on one of the topics linked in your proposal is pretty insightful on some of the issues in trying to cater to other conventions, but also on the more realistic approach we can and should have:
The key here is trying to make it more comfortable for everyone, instead of adding another workload making an additional thing to comfort some people and not others. We lack the manpower to make more than a few color themes, so instead let's find other scalable solutions for each issue that profits everyone.
I think the closest reasonable thing you could have is Blender getting an option to automatically apply either of its official dark/light theme depending on the system, and maybe in the future shipping with an accessibility theme or alternatively keep working on the current two themes to make them usable by more people.
This will hopefully be made easier by the ongoing theme editor simplification and the already implemented title bars following theme colors .
But, when it comes to applying even just color themes for the different GUI toolkits there are, I think that's crossing the line of diminishing returns.
Blender's current GUI theme is quite complex, with many different elements that meet each other with different states and conditions. Even if you follow an existing color theme definition instead of inventing a new one out of thin air, it requires a lot of work to even apply that color theme, and then it needs a ton of testing and user feedback to keep things balanced, keep contrast where needed for readability, and this in all areas, all states, all edge cases, ... And maintain that through each update of the GUI. Blender is already doing this for two themes.
You could have fun and take a look at the themes section of the official Blender Extensions Platform and try a few themes for yourself. You will see pretty quickly that they all have issues that can make Blender unusable in some areas. A frequent issue I see is text labels being unreadable in specific selection states, e.g. in the Outliner.
And again, even when trying to adapt an existing robust color theme is tedious because even though you already have pre-existing color definitions and "assignation rules", Blender having a complex GUI will lead to many areas where you have to make decisions outside the official definition to get a good result.
One recent occurrence of this problematic I've witnessed for Blender in particular is for trying to port Catppuccin .
Catppuccin is an established pastel that's been well-rounded by a massive community accross many softwares . It's not even 4 years old but it's already being ported over ~70 packages and with ~350 ongoing ports repositories. That is to say, it's popular, active and prolofic. And yet, when it comes to Blender, none of the attempts to port Catppuccin seem to have made a satisfying result so far.
On One Blender Issue To Rule Them All · Issue #2303 · catppuccin/catppuccin , we can read many inputs and examples explaining why. To sum it up:
As Lolock mentions, the reasons are listed in the very links you posted.
And personally, I would not want my install of blender to match my OS theme.
@thorn, disabling it should be as simple as disabling a preference. However, why? Such a comment isn't much use unless you state why it would be a problem, considering that it works for most other applications (including Krita, GIMP 3, and Inkscape).
Because developers spending time on such a feature, is far more involved than a user just changing their own theme from light-to-dark on their own, when the need arises.
People have said the same thing about the Adobe suite for like a decade. When the bulk of your time is spent in Adobe apps, or Modo, or Blender or Zbrush, your OS apperance becomes insignificant. I've got 1 old mac for Adobe apps before the cloud, Another mac for Adobe and Blender and an ancient version of Zbrush, then 2 laptops with windows and ubuntu for Blender. I'd like Blender to stay Blenderish, Adobe to stay Adobeish, and Zbrush to stay Zbrushish regardless of the OS.
Unless you've accessibility requirements.
Yes, but making Blender "Adhere to the OS/DE's colour scheme" wouldn't help with that either. If making an accessible UI was just as simple as applying an arbitrary color scheme, many more software would already be accessible and not require specialized developers dedicated to make accessibility features.