True dark color mode

When you switch your operating system to a dark theme, is SmartGit showing up properly in dark? It should.

I use OS X dark mode but never seen any difference in SmartGit. I have the latest 8.0.3 version installed.

Sadly on Windows 10 I cannot get the dark mode to work. I switched to the dark mode and am using a dark color in my theme. Any ideas where I am going wrong? I really like that you are supporting a dark mode!

I am running SmartGit on Mac OS X. I don't understand what you mean by "a dark theme", I use indeed the "dark" menu. Here is what Smartgit looks like: https://db.tt/Bcdiekvo

I don't have access to a Mac currently, but you have switch your entire OSX to Dark Mode. Have a look at e.g.: http://osxdaily.com/2015/11/26/enable-dark-mode-mac-os-x/

It is disappointing to hear reference to switching operating system theme. I don't have to monkey with my operating system when I use the dark theme in IntelliJ or GitKraken. Why does SmartGit have this unique requirement compared to its competitors?

There are ways to get your entire application a single theme,. it's not right to have to monkey around in the system. The user should be able to select a theme in the application.

For Windows users who have not disabled Aero:

I invert my entire screen with a simple lightweight open-source program called NegativeScreen to reduce my eye strain at work. I've been using it for years and I've been very happy with it. Doing this, I really don't care if my favorite programs have dark themes available. I only toggle it off when I need accurate color doing design work or looking at pictures, which isn't that often for me as a programmer. If you need accurate colors often, perhaps this wouldn't be a good solution for you. HTH

IMHO it would be a waste of effort to expect each application to provide its own dark theme. This is the task of the operating system. We helped those users which have their operating system set up with a dark theme by providing a dark editor color theme.

BTW, I've tried to implement a dark theme with SWT, but it looked horrible because a lot of colors, e.g. the selection colors, are NOT configurable. Maybe this situation improves in the (mid to far) feature.

I tried switching to dark theme in my Ubuntu but no luck. Use dark theme in IntelliJ and my eyes thank me for that.

Aurelijus, please try the Vivacious-unity-zblackout-aqua dark theme.

On Ubuntu 16.04, I found that some dark themes aren't recognized by smartgit (Adwaita, Vivacious-dark-*). I ended up going with Arc-dark-solid, and also confirmed that Vivacious-zblackout-* works.

All who are interested, please vote for https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=500720.

Pretty naive comment but as Eclipse IDE has a dark theme, they may have use some workarounds that can be used also for SmartGit ?

Here is a screenshot how SmartGit would look:

Especially note the black texts in the toolbar, tree selection, checkboxes, and the still gray title bar and table headers.

Would you think this to be sufficient?

I would love to try this. Would it be possible to download this version?

Ha sorry, didn't understood there was only the checkbox problem ! Thanks for the capture, it looks very fine by me, I would love to be able to use it !!

Does not work on OSX El Capitan with dark mode enabled..

What exactly did you do on OS X and what does not work?

@ThomasSinger are your talking to me ? I am running OSX El Capitan with Dark color mode enabled and I would expect that the full interface of smartgit switch to a dark theme not only the comparison windows.

The "Dark theme" option in the SmartGit preferences, page "Built-in Text Editors", only has influence to the built-in text editors. I'm currently playing with a full-app-theme but the API is extremely limited and hence the results very bad (see the above bugs.eclipse.org link).

@ThomasSinger, Vivacious-zblackout works indeed, thank you. However I hope you will tame java for full theme :)

Almost all my instruments as a developer are dark now.

Webstorm, Chrome/Firefox devtools, programmers chats (hipchat, slack), etc

SmartGit is the only one tool left (which I very like) that burns my eyes :)

I hope, you can do fully dark mode in SmartGit, and I will not have to switch to GitKraken. Thanks!

Delphi Rad Studio 10 - Firemonkey can compile win32 native, win64, ios, and andoid programs with an openGL interface,. any color you want,.

And that aside, the win32 is able to use a custom draw event,. im pretty sure there is "some" way to do a dark color theme.

Strange, a couple of years ago people complained about Swing user interfaces not looking platform-specific, but now people complain if the user interface look platform-specific. It looks like always some people are complaining.

If you want to test-drive, please download SmartGit 8.1 preview 4 and invoke Help | Check for Latest Build to get #9048. Then create a file, e.g. dark-theme.properties with following content:

button.background=inherit
button.foreground=inherit
combo.background=inherit
combo.foreground=inherit
composite.background=inherit
composite.background#instructions=#505050
composite.foreground=inherit
label.background=inherit
label.foreground=inherit
link.background=inherit
link.foreground=inherit
qTabFolder.background=inherit
qTabFolder.foreground=inherit
sash.background=inherit
shell.background=#3f3f3f
shell.foreground=#cfcfcf
styledText.background=inherit
styledText.foreground=inherit
tabFolder.background=inherit
table.background=#303030
table.foreground=#e0e0e0
table.background#filter.searchHidden=#303020
table.background#filter.warning=#302020
text.background=inherit
text.foreground=inherit
toolBar.background=inherit
toolBar.foreground=inherit
tree.background=#303030
tree.foreground=#e0e0e0
info=#808080
warning=#f0f080
error=#ff8080
directories#warning=#ff8080
branches#ahead=#f0c080
branches#behind=#80f080
branches#approved=#80f080
branches#rejected=#ff8080

then open smartgit.properties in an editor and add the line

smartgit.theme.file=C:/Path/to/dark-theme.properties

Restart SmartGit.

Thanks ! It's definitively a big change !

I need to use it more to have an opinion, but on a first look I can see 2 problems : icons text in the toolbar are black, so you almost can't read them. Also, the view names have a grey background, it's a bit to bright.

But anyway it's a very very good start, bravo !

"icons text in the toolbar are black" - that's what I meant with "the API does not allow to change all colors". Please also take a look at dialogs, e.g. the preferences - they look worse.

Yeah ok, after some hours using this "dark" SmartGit, there are indeed some progress to do.

Besides the 2 problems I've already list :

- in treeviews (repositories, branches, output, ...) the icons are almost black, so almost invisible
- the compare marks colors on right ruler are not bright enough so it is difficult to clearly see them
- no color for highlited lines on non selected views : for exemple, in the log, click on a commit, then on a file : you can't see anymore which commit is selected
- color for repo with modifications is too dark

Eclipse IDE has 2 background colors, one for space between views and one for view content, the later being darker than the first one. This seems like a good solution for icons text and tab labels ?

Yeah, it's pretty ugly :D Any other way to hack it?

TImage,. or customdraw. Not sure what API they are using,. but simply drawing an image, and such might work.

The latest build 9051 improves the look a little bit. Now

smartgit.theme.file=dark

in smartgit.properties is sufficient to activate the default dark theme.

Wooo, bravo, at first glance it REALLY improves the look !! I will let you know after some time using it !

Nice work, seems usable!

So, after almost a day using the latest dark theme...

Some of the previously raised issues are still a problem in my opinion :

- compare right ruler colors : no change ?
- log window selected line on non selected view : better, but still quite not good. Might be improved using the light grey color for the message column in the commits view ?

And I saw those new ones :

- in the pull dialog, the "more option" label has a surprising background (dark although the dialog itself has the light grey)

- in the delete branch dialog, if the option "delete tracked branch" option is unchecked, then the "delete from remote" option is almost invisible

Anyway, the last version is a great improvement indeed, it's getting better and better !!

- compare right ruler colors : no change ?

These colors can be changed in the preferences - they are from the editor theme.

A lot of other issues I have fixed in the latest build 9055. Please vote for following SWT bugs:

• Toolbar ignores foreground color - we keep it as is
• Tree: selection color hard to read - we've found a workaround
• Colors of table headers can't be changed
• Disabled trees and tables ignore set background color - we simply don't disable trees and tables any more to work around
• Disabled checkboxes and radio buttons hard/impossible to read if disabled - we've changed the background color slightly
• Checkboxes and radio buttons with incorrect focus border - fixed
• TabFolder does not allow changing background or foreground color
• Combobox does not allow changing background or foreground color

>> compare right ruler colors : no change ?

> These colors can be changed in the preferences - they are from the editor theme.

Indeed I can't find any good combination because the colors are applied both in the ruler and in the editor... and the ruler should have light colors, but not the editor (if so text becomes mostly unreadable).

Just restored defaults colors on the latest build (#9047), and I see light colors in the ruler and nice colors in the editors. It's very nice now, bravo !

What do you think about the latest build 9061?

Not sure I saw every modifications :D But at least :

* great change on the background color for selected lines, both in main window and log window, perfect catch, perfectly usable now !

* in the repositories window, some text (favorites, updates number) in light green : much more readable !

I definitively LOVE this new dark theme \o/

Not sure which build I had before, but I was using it for a week or so for everyday work, suited me fine. Of course it can be just good combination between smartgit's dark theme and ubuntu's Vivacious-dark theme.

Can I somehow choose which build to download? Build 9061 is less suitable for me, I think top bar with icons and list column header become brighter again.

Ha right, I've downloaded the build 9061 this morning and the main window toolbar background is bright again :( The previous dark colors worked pretty well in my opinion...

This is an intentional change, because black text on dark-gray background is really hard to read and looks quite buggy.

Ok... Was the case on the first release, but it was really ok for me on the latest one (previous 9061)...

Same here, for me previous build was the one I could use always.

Installed the latest build (#9064), and the dark theme is not working anymore ? My smartgit.properties still has smartgit.theme.file=dark but it seems this has no effect anymore, I've got the default Smartgit interface...

there is a configuration on User Interface setting

Oh ok, thanks !

The new system independent dark theme doesn't look so good.

• Not everything is dark. So it doesn't blend all tool windows seamlessly.
• Mix of gray/black is more hurting to eyes
• The collapse icons are almost invisible

Hi,

The mix of gray and black weren't present in the first versions and believe me, they are mandatory ;)

For the toolbar background color I was also happier with a dark background : the last version before switching back to light gray was better looking, and also easily readable... in my opinion :)

If I don't forget, I will update the documentation on how to modify the theme using a properties file. This will also allow to modify the toolbar's background color.

Not everything is possible to change. The toolbar foreground color can't be changed at the moment on Windows (see SWT bug above) - hence I rather keep it as is. The tree triangles can't be changed, too, the table headers and scrollbars, too. The Changes view coloring you can change in the preferences. It is configurable by the user and hence not affected by the theme.

With SmartGit 17.1 preview 3 it becomes easier to create own themes: http://www.syntevo.com/blog/?p=4391.

So, is there a way to make SmartGit truly dark in Windows 10? I created the own.theme file with 17.1, but I don't see anything about scroll bars there. Light scroll bars in a dark theme are annoying. 

The SWT API to set certain colors improves continuously, but does not yet allow to configure every control or part of a control.

Hope mac version's header could dark with Mojave system