I would love to have a look if you can shoot me a copy or make them available somewhere. They are different to the Themes I have found so far, and I don’t reinvent wheels:-) TIA
Could you guide me on the following, before I make a fool of myself again as a Noob. In Theme Manager there is a “MoreThemes” button. When I click on that nothing happens? What am I doing wrong? I read one thread where @humdinger said the “get more” way of working was not supported by Haiku. Is that the case here? I have been loading themes through HaikuDepot, that appear in ThemeManager but there are not many there.
IMHO that app is now obsolete with the recent update to the Appearance preference and should be removed. All you need to do is set three main elements’ colours and the rest get computed for you. It is absolutely brilliant.
Both of them can be handy, I store my changes in the Appearance preferrences into 2 different themes here, one for daylight, and one for evening (dark) mode, makes switching these 2 pretty easy
Agreed as I found useful setting in both with ThemeManager letting me test Themes others have developed and Appearance letting me tweak things (to save with ThemeManger if I want). They could be combined into one Manager with the theme save and load being a function within Appearance, but not a biggy.
I figured out my problem and why no-one answered “What does the “More Themes” button in ThemeManager do?” I already had HaikuDepot open and it snuck _theme into the HaikuDepot search bar without bringing the HaikuDepot window into focus in front of the other windows Nothing appeared to have happened LOL.
Is that a bug or punishment for being lax at window closing ?
ThemeManager is still useful but to use with care.
Among other things,
Decorators are saved with full path and a bad decorator can lead to app server crash.
Control look is not saved and few colours are not either.
It doesn’t save colours and fonts separately. So, you can apply a theme that requires fonts not on your system. Worse, if these fonts are found they may not render correctly with your language.
The “More themes” button is supposed to open a window to find themes online. It is really an old app that used to work on BeOS then Zeta and it has capabilities to import BeOS, Zeta and Win9x themes. I can’t remember it working on Haiku.
ThemeManager does more than system colours and fonts, and therefore doesn’t fit exactly into the Appearance prefs. It also stores the config of background images, sounds, screensaver and Terminal settings.
I use ThemeManager often to switch between my regular theme (bigger fonts, custom colours, background image) and “documentation themes” with Haiku defaults, or smaller font sizes, to make screenshots for the user guide and other docs.
There could be some improvements, like including Replicants on Desktop, locale settings and all Deskbar settings, etc. It could also re-start Tracker and Deskbar so the changes settings take effect.
If anyone wants to improve ThemeManager, I’m sure mmu_man accepts your PRs at:
Thank you for that very informative Post @humdinger. I was wondering about saving sound setups, and you saved me asking I must check it out.
Definitely ThemeManger is essential in developing/share superficial level Haiku usability, and personal tweaking for those who want to do it. I am interested why @michel said it wasn’t needed, unless he was thinking along the lines of my post.
I still think logically ThemeManager and Appearance could be integrated. Maybe I should have said Appearance should be subsumed into a revamped ThemeManager so usage is more obvious. That would mean Sounds and other thematic Gs (Deskbar, background, screen saver …) UI setting should go there too.
Sorry I haven’t upskilled enough to do it myself yet.
Nothing appeared to have happened LOL.
I must check it out.