How about just giving the user the choice between different preset color swatches instead of dumbing down the highly customizable options we have now?
I don’t do “just”.
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I know we probably talked about this a bit already but I do think we should move to some named themes (certainly starting with Light and Dark but with the possibility for the user to add new ones) but still with the possibility of setting colors in detail in those themes (in a theme definition window I suppose.) I don’t think we should need a third-party application to be able to make a detailed color theme. Maybe other aspects of Theme Manager could be kept there (like wallpapers and fonts), though maybe even some of that should just be pulled into the Appearances preflet.
But I do think the default settings should be kept simple and we should have a few well defined themes and I do also like the idea of an accent color which gets applied where appropriate. Ideally we can make the default case simple without then making the complicated case impossible or overly difficult.
Anyhow this is sort of off-topic for this thread.
I don’t know what the point of themes would be in Haiku, I’d just generate the colors based on the given accent color and mode, anything more advanced can be done in the thememanager. Anyhow, yes this is a bit OT, maybe you can move these two replies to the orher thread?
I guess we can see how it looks when you are done but I think it is not ideal to remove existing functionality that some people depend on to make things simpler. I think most people agree the current status quo of a bunch of color sliders is not good but dumbing it down completely is also not ideal.
Something about Theme Manager annoys me, maybe just it feels a bit clunky and many of the themes are very garish. So I personally would rather not be forced to use it if I want to make my own theme. Though I’m sure people will “say patches” welcome on Theme Manager which is fair.
For me a theme is a complete set, that is colors, decorator, wallpaper, controllook and maybe private colors, fonts, replican arangement, screensaver should all be provided as one. I don’t think haiku should add direct support for this intree, I much more prefer the current way where individual stuff can be set if needed.
There should be a seperate application to make themes, package them, share them, install them, if that is theme manager I don’t know, personally I don’t need this funxtionality so never use theme manager.
Now, as for the colors preflet itself it is incredibly hard to use and overly complex, not only is it badly understandable what the sliders do, they also allow you to directly set an invalid color scheme, I don’t think this should be possible at all.
So the question is how to redesign it, one option is to do it similar to MacOS abd have one accent color that determines the main color of the system, in addition to a preference of light on dark or dark on light contrast.
If this prooves insufficient one could add a bit more, but above all it should be simple to use and not posdible to break 
Apart from that there are are severall applications to fix for dark mode, the controllook beeds to be improved etc.
For completeness I’ll attach my personal todo for it below.
(and here is my, albeit hacky, git tree: https://git.gryphno.de/nephele/haiku/commits/branch/nephele-build )
As long as it doesn’t break the custom settings. I’m a fan of those and like the detailed control of my color scheme.
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Not quite finished yet, but wip for webkit 
dark mode page
Light mode page
edit: the dark mode button has the text color forced, the rest hasent. I still need to properly color stuff.
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Image display with dark background:
And with native document color:
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What exactly is an invalid color scheme?
black on black, anything that is unreadable duo to lacking contrast
If that is what the user wishes, I don’t see how that is invalid.
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If it is possible to check contrast algorithmically, then sure. If not, then prolly best to just let users do what they want.
Worked a bit more on the dark mode support, the next version of haikuwebkit should pick the document color the system is configured to use automatically.
edit: this is a html document without any styling, apart from the css value of color-scheme: light dark;
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I’ll try implementing this tommorow, the colors tab can stay behind a “More Colors…” button in the same tab.
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