Install with loaded Stylesheets, especially night mode options

[pavlidvg]

I am currently working on my fork of the project and noticed that the best way to get night mode is to find and install qt stylesheets. I personally really like this approach as it is fully customizable, but a lot of users not familiar with qt might struggle to even find good quality stylesheets.

I also imagine that it's quite common for a lot of people to want to immediately switch to a dark theme before working with the editor, so maybe having some sort of dark preset option will even benefit the users that plan to install stylesheets in the future.

I'm thinking of an implementation similar to the "Default preview state" in the "Behavior" tab. Maybe adding a "Select theme" option in the "Interface" with a combobox that has a couple of presets, along with the original. I have some stylesheets I've been working on, and it's even possible to find some Open source ones (with proper credit given).

Would you consider such a pull request if it was implemented succesfully?

[pavlidvg]

Sorry if mentioning you is considered rude or spam and I apologize @mitya57, I am just seeking your attention because I don't want to start working on an implementation if you're not interested in the feature.

[mitya57]

Hi!

I believe I fixed most of the dark theme issues in version 7.2.1. So with Adwaita-Dark, Breeze-Dark and other themes ReText should look good out of the box. Issue #492 has some screenshots.

Or your issue is allowing users to run ReText with a theme different than a system one? For that case, Qt has a -style command line flag or a QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE environment variable.

Also, there is qt6ct tool which allows you to configure a system-wide style.

I am not opposed to a new feature, I'm just trying to understand which problem it would solve.

[pavlidvg]

@mitya57
After doing a bit more research on the subject, I realize I worded my idea incorrectly. I have found nothing wrong with the dark breeze implementation on the app itself.

What I was proposing was a small add on, allowing the users to change to the dark breeze theme (or possibly some other dark theme) on runtime and through the qt GUI. Possibly as an extra option on the "Interface" tab on the menu.

I know that it doesn't seem like a big deal since it doesn't add functionality, but I think it will be a pretty good imporevment on UX, plus it will help with windows support and be similar to UX windows are used to.

I am only guessing here, but I think a good percentage of Retex users immediately install dark themes (I would assume dark breeze or something very similar), so why not have it featured inside the GUI, instead of it just being a command line argument?

[mitya57]

Sorry for the late response.

If it's not too much code (10-20 lines are good, 50 is bad), a pull request is welcome. Please use the word “themes”, not “stylesheets”, it will be less confusing.

I also want to note that recently Qt got the ability to use palette from the GTK theme (https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/437950). So if you are using a GTK-based desktop environment and select a dark theme there, Qt will use it out of the box starting with version 6.5. Until that's available, you can use qt6ct to set a system-wide theme.