[GNC-dev] Gtk and themes

[Adrien Monteleone]

> On Oct 19, 2018, at 9:38 AM, cicko <alen.siljak at gmx.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> My point, on the other hand, would be - the users want customizations and
> that won't change anytime soon. And you can confirm that simply by
> considering the amount of questions on this list referring to fonts,
> spacing, colors, sizes, icons, etc. 
> Unfortunately.
> 

A non-scientific recollection based on recent threads is that most of this is coming from the Windows base. There are some UI bugs I see asked about on Mac, and a few window sizing issues on linux, but most of the desire for visual changes is from people on Windows who liked the old GTK2 look and don’t like the GTK3 styling with respect to colors and especially padding. Maybe linux users can figure out how to use the gtk-inspector and learn enough CSS to make things work for them and we don’t hear anything. Maybe MacOS users are so used to not being able to change much of anything, they just accept the new look. (and some like me, prefer it with a few custom CSS tweaks) I don’t know if you can extrapolate the number of users *asking* for styling assistance on the Windows platform to what total percentage of downloads for that platform actually want customization, but I’d say the *need* is rather tiny. Overall, I’d hazard a rough guess that less than 10 users have been involved in such threads from the asking perspective.

Personally, I don’t think GnuCash needs to worry about theming other than to try to follow best practices and not introduce many, or any, custom widgets that can break via different desktop themes. Support a light and dark variant app theme that looks decent across Windows, Mac, Gnome & Ubuntu as that will cover 99%+ of the user base, with the GTK3 and CSS wiki pages for the fraction of 1% left out. Ideally, if someone could figure out how to run gtk-inspector on Windows, that might be helpful for those folks. In the meantime, making the app work correctly is certainly more important, as is re-working the code base to eventually facilitate a move to an MVC pattern that might facilitate easier visual customization, or at least more native platform integration to remove the occasion for the requests.

Regards,
Adrien