Implement Dark Mode, streamline Appearance options

[bitigchi]

One could say that "Dark Mode" is the new fad. I disagree. Computers were always meant to be used with dark interfaces. I mean, come on, whose idea was that to stare at white bright screens all the time? I get it, with the inception of Macintosh, it was kind of a proof-of-concept, showing that it is not necessary to stare at a monochrome white-on-black screen all the time. It was cool, but we never recovered totally.

Without further ado, below stuff would be cool to have:

1. Get rid of colours section in Appearance. Instead:
   1. Have a toggle for dark/light mode
   2. Have a menu to select accent colours
   3. Have a menu to select selection colour
2. Tone down or get rid of the gradient in panels and window title bars. This looks outdated, and looks horrible with a dark background. Original Be look works better with it (some polish still necessary)
3. Standardise system colours. Like:
   1. Primary/secondary/tertiary label colour (light/dark)
   2. Standardised system colours for the accents and selections (optimised for light/dark)
   3. Standardised light/dark panel colours (active/inactive)
   4. Standardised light/dark menu colours (active/inactive)
   5. Standardised light/dark button colours (active/inactive)
4. Tone down window borders. Currently every other system element seems to have a border, and this adds clutter to the general view. System widgets/views should not necessarily be very plain, but there's gotta be a middle ground. For instance:
   1. Windows 10 look is cool, but too plain and glossy dark. It is obvious that this is the work of a professional design team, but IMO not the Haiku way.
   2. GTK3 widgets are very plain and lacks the basic distinctions required for effective human usage. Just look at the dark mode for Mint for instance, it is just dark.
   3. macOS has the best middle ground in my opinion, without much glaring or being too stale. Colours are accurately chosen, windows do not have clutter in terms of elements, and active/inactive distinction is accurately shown.

Also the default font for Haiku is too light/thin. Font weight should be increased a notch to have a better look.

I am attaching two screenshots with a dark look. One has BE, and the other one has Haiku decorator.

[bitigchi]

BE decorator

[bitigchi]

Haiku decorator

[X512]

Replying to bitigchi:

One could say that "Dark Mode" is the new fad. I disagree. Computers were always meant to be used with dark interfaces. I mean, come on, whose idea was that to stare at white bright screens all the time?

I disagree :) Black on white is natural for humans. Almost all books and papers are dark on bright. Unlike cats, humans are day active species and seeing lot of light is natural. Bright on dark computers were originally because of technical limitations of early displays. One of reason of Macintosh success was white display.

Anyway, there is API for decorator and control look add-on, so third party developers can make any design they like. I like current Haiku design.

[diver]

See #11636.

[nephele]

Staring at white screens causes me physical pain usually, so i certainly see the need for this, however i do not agree with the aproch.

There is no need to get rid of the color settings, those should still be available for users (or theme creators) that want this kind of lowlevel control,

Point 2 is a matter of personal preference, i see no reason to change this, you can already pick whatever decorator you like, if you want you can even make one that renders like microsoft 10 edge window tabs.

as for fonts those are configureable already.

This is an approach i would suggest: allow a method to 'save' the settings of font size, dpi size, window decorator, colors, size of deskbar icons etc. basically anything that makes the visual theme of the OS

this save could then be given a name so users can more easily switch between them, aswell as exporting it to give to other users, with this thing then we can add a default haiku-light and haiku-dark template which one can then switch between, or adjust as they want. (Personally i like pink/purple themes, but i certainly don't want to force that on anyone else :3)

[pulkomandy]

This is an approach i would suggest: allow a method to 'save' the settings of font size, dpi size, window decorator, colors, size of deskbar icons etc. basically anything that makes the visual theme of the OS

You have just described the Haiku Theme Manager: ​https://github.com/mmuman/HaikuThemeManager

As for white screens, just turn down the contrast and brightness of your display. They all come preset to "maximum shine" to grab your eye when shown on the shelves in stores, which is of course not at all what you need. A properly adjusted screen is much better.

In any case, I would prefer the appearance settings to have only a few colors to set (one background, one foreground, one or maybe two highlights) and all other colors be derived from these. However, this does not go very well with the current BControlLook, which has a lot of finetuning and subtleties, making it difficult to find a single highlight color that works well with it. So there would be quite some rework to do here.

[nephele]

As for white screens, just turn down the contrast and brightness of your display. They all come preset to "maximum shine" to grab your eye when shown on the shelves in stores, which is of course not at all what you need. A properly adjusted screen is much better.

I usually operate my devices at the absolute minimum they support and sometimes employ an additional software backlight, on some days that is not enough still :), In any case, white on black themes are much nicer because they simply emit much less light.

As for a revised appearence settings, i doubt that the current color values will go away in the code but perhaps the actual settings can be moved away into a haikuports application to create themes and be replaced in-tree with a simpler screen as you suggest, that would still give people that really want it the ability to change those or create a theme with absolute control.

Perhaps a mockup of a new panel could be made to argue over