Taiga: Dark Mode Inquiry

[george-emerald]

This is an amazing app for tracking and organizing anime and I'm very thankful to great open source programs that people spend their free time to make without pay. But, I just don't understand why this feature has been postponed for so long. It has been requested very many times for years now and each time it's pushed to a v. 2.0 that doesn't even have a branch here yet. The High Contrast Theme solution that has been posited completely destroys your entire Windows UI. Is it really this difficult to implement a button that changes the colours from white to black and a shade of dark grey? The blinding white background is only present in this one program in my entire computer.

[erengy]

Is it really this difficult to implement a button that changes the colours from white to black and a shade of dark grey?

You must understand that Taiga doesn't paint its UI, Windows does. All the controls you see are almost entirely drawn and painted by the operating system. This is because Taiga is a native desktop application, which is kind of old-school by today's standards. It makes Taiga efficient and consistent, but it also makes some features unfeasible.

Changing to dark mode is not as simple as saying, "hey Windows, paint my application with this palette, please." I wish it was. It's more like, "give me the tools, I'll paint my own goddamn application myself." Not only that, but some tools are unreliable, some stuff are practically unpaintable, and the guides are written in Ancient Greek.

I tried. It took me more than 20 hours just to get the main window and the anime list partially dark. This is a great deal of work that really should be handled by the OS. Microsoft seems to be slowly bringing the dark mode to desktop apps such as File Explorer, so hopefully we'll see more of it in future updates.

[shafschwd]

@george-emerald if u don't mind using theme u can get pure dark mode by installing this theme

[avail]

https://stackoverflow.com/a/55670413
you can use this or similar to retrieve windows colours and have them auto-swap depending on theme

[george-emerald]

https://stackoverflow.com/a/55670413
you can use this or similar to retrieve windows colours and have them auto-swap depending on theme

The thread says that you can somehow make Win32 applications built on C++ change their colour depending on your theme, but I can't figure out how to do it. Do you change some registry value? Input lines of code on Powershell or cmd? Please explain how to enable this as it could fix the problem.

[erengy]

I wish, but there isn't a hidden trick like that. Changing that registry value is the same as changing the color from Settings → Personalization → Colors, which doesn't affect Win32 applications. The accepted answer simply provides a way to get the setting programmatically.

This, or retrieving the colors, is like 1% of what's currently necessary to make Taiga dark themed. Sadly, my previous comment still applies. And yes, I'm aware of undocumented APIs such as the ones in ysc3839/win32-darkmode.

In short, Taiga won't have dark mode until either Microsoft officially allows that (maybe after WinUI 3 release this year?), or until after v2 where Taiga will switch to a framework such as Qt or wxWidgets.

[george-emerald]

This, or retrieving the colors, is like 1% of what's currently necessary to make Taiga dark themed. Sadly, my previous comment still applies. And yes, I'm aware of undocumented APIs such as the ones in ysc3839/win32-darkmode.

How can I use the undocumented API?

[beep4beep]

The dark theme on windows 10 has evolved a little, nearly every app is dark themed now, including my windows file explorer.

Remember the advanced option "Application UI Theme"? You can add your own take on the taiga theme by making a copy from the default theme folder, then edit the xml. Once you are done you can change default to the name of the folder of your new theme. Sadly it only works for the progress bar. Meaning the background for the graph etc.

Really hoping for a better solution.