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[Anonymous84]

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[Bwaak]

"Dark mode" is an idiotic concept that app vendors accepted either (1) in the absence of centralized control over colors of common controls, or (2) because they felt they needed to design their own controls in place of standard OS controls, and these controls are not handled by the OS. I hate custom-drawn controls because they break the coherent look of the apps and the OS and because they usually are very slow.

In Windows, the features of common controls and dialogs are handled in Control Panel / Appearance and Personalization / Personalization. You can choose colors and size of common controls, and Windows will change it for all applications.

VirtualDub uses standard Windows controls, so it is fully compliant with Windows color scheme.

[_Al_]

He is talking about a color schema. Dark mode colors (if there are for virtualdub) and its color for fonts, backgrounds, etc. Not different forms and such.

So switching color scheme in Windows will switch it in virtualdub as well?

[Anonymous84]

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[Bwaak]

Virtualdub does not have setting to use system colors, like dark.

Is this not what you want?

[Alwyn]

You're the only one from above who understood my request.

I understand too, my NLE years ago changed to bright and we revolted. It got changed back to dark. Dark is not idiotic at all.

@Bwaak, show us one of your standard Windows screens with that dark VDub setting.

[Bwaak]

my NLE years ago changed to bright and we revolted. It got changed back to dark. Dark is not idiotic at all.

Dark mode as a feature of a particular application is idiotic. It is borne of Apple's authoritarian insistence on the specific color palette and the size of controls in OSX UI. Windows has always allowed you to have a dark or gray or yellow or pink mode for ALL applications at once.

@Bwaak, show us one of your standard Windows screens with that dark VDub setting.

It is not a VDub setting, it is the standard Windows setting, and has been since at least Win 3.0, maybe earlier, but this was the first Windows I' ve used. I don't know why do you want to see other windows, but sure, here are some. You can see that ImgBurn honors the standard Win UI conventions just like VDub.

[Alwyn]

Where's a brick wall.

[Bwaak]

Where's a brick wall.

You don't sound satisfied.

[mammo1789]

Dark mode as a feature of a particular application is idiotic. It is borne of Apple's authoritarian insistence on the specific color palette and the size of controls in OSX UI. Windows has always allowed you to have a dark or gray or yellow or pink mode for ALL applications at once.

I suppose he is talking about the UI of the Vdub itself not the windows scheme that we all know. Adobe Premiere for instance can have from darkest to lightest UI color and different size or color for it menus regardless of the windows chosen color palate . Darker colors closer to black are more easy on the eyes especially at night and there is nothing moronic about it

[Bwaak]

The point of common controls and common dialogs is to provide cohesive look, feel and experience; relieve apps from mundane common tasks that the OS should do; reduce codebase; reduce file sizes; simply APIs, etc. Apps should not care about chrome, they should only care about what is happening in their client area. I hate apps with custom UI - they look non-standard, they often require different interaction, their UI library may depend on some obscure API or library that may break after upgrading the OS, and they often are slower because of all of these hand-drawn elements, which are written very inefficiently.

[Alwyn]

@Bwaak, will you stop lecturing us on your pet hates and theories and stick to the topic. Plenty of programs have dark interfaces, for good reason; get over it.

[_Al_]

Don't mind my rant, if too long, just an evening coffee time and relief ,..., also could be wrong,...

Bwaak, Custom color theme is not a big deal at all (if you develop anything having that in mind since beginning) , no size issues as mentioned. On the contrary. If you custom color modes, you have a couple of groups of colors and you just set them as arguments, and it is deployed. If you start to pull colors from Windows settings, then it gets difficult, I don't know, getting values from registry and mirror it into an apps colors. But ui's can be vastly different, you just cannot copy color scheme from app to app.

Btw, still, you mix color schemes issues and some kind of custom irregular form gui shapes (shape of buttons etc.), which has nothing to do with colors.

Also, if you are developer , setting ui color schemes strictly by windows (OS) what are you going to tell them if they want to go dark mode? Like go to windows settings and change it? And what about he wants only that or that app be in dark mode but not that app? Perhaps it is possible to app specialize it, but are you going to spit an article to a user what he suppose to do? What if you take an app on a thumb drive to a business presentation using another laptop, and then you present some fetish pink ui that was secretly used by real laptop owner/administrator? What if Windows developers decide to have a black theme turned on in February, green on Irish day and red/pink/yellow/green/purple theme on some LGBTQ day? Exaggerating, but maybe not, this World gets weird by a second. Btw. you posted some hellish black theme and green text which looks really weird. And each app demands different scheme. Some things/ideas look good on paper, but not in reality.

What Qt is doing for example is setting OS color setting, like you mentioned, since 6.5 custom pallets for modes, and also some color schemes, so perhaps deploying each single colors for actions/backgrounds/texts etc. is not necessary. Besides doing it all manually deploying colors as you want.

But talking about simplicity, you always have to have a code overhead for a GUI. Like Qt. If using python language, build in module tkinter, you can use GUI without any extra module. Then there is customtkinter with dark, light modes additions etc. or some other modules. Code overhead is negligible if we speak about this. You use Qt (most developers use Qt, there is versions for many languages) and you have to include more data. That code part that takes windows scheme, that is an overhead, perhaps it takes from registry etc.

[Bwaak]

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[_Al_]

Would you post, ..., step 1, 2, 3 ..., what to do, to have a color theme in VD taken from OS?

[Bwaak]

Would you post, ..., step 1, 2, ..., what to do, to have a color theme in VD taken from OS?

As I wrote above, it is in Control Panel / Appearance and Personalization / Personalization, at least on Win7. For Win10/11 google something like "windows 10 color scheme settings", and the very first link is Change colors in Windows. It looks like Win10/11 have hidden lots of things that had previously been user-adjustable from Control Panel, this is a shame. One more reason for me to keep using Win7. They are still in the Registry for backward compatibility. So much about user friendliness of Win10/11. Just a couple of workarounds I quickly googled: How to Customize the Scrollbars on Windows 10 and 11, How to change menu row height in Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.

[_Al_]

That should be said in your first response though.

Qt is doing what is necesarry, letting developer change colors for any text, backgrounds , widgets etc, now introducing color schemes and something to take it also from OS. But for sure they could not rely strictly on OS, taking values from registry etc.
It is an idea, to have one simple solution, but that would need to be managed and not changed much, Microsoft would not take care of it, because there is no money for Microsoft from it. Heck more changes for them, the better, because they need you to download latest version, again and again.

Working on a website, long time ago, where there were two standards for html code, one for browsers and then there was Internet Explorer. So kind of along learning two "standards". Couldn't they just follow common standard? I remember not figuring it out then thinking if it was intentional or a neglect.

[Alwyn]

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[sum_guy]

Just in case you didn't know, Windows 10 and 11, Dark mode is found in settings --> personalization --> Themes. There are two or three available dark modes.

[_Al_]

Yes, but how to launch VirtualDub actually using those settings as Bwaak posts.