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icon4.gif  Eclipse Juno themes [message #844978] Sat, 14 April 2012 11:45 Go to next message
Yurx Cherio is currently offline Yurx Cherio
Messages: 3
Registered: April 2012
Junior Member

Hardcoded white background color[ 9 votes ]
1.Should only use Eclipse colors 2 / 22%
2.Should only use System palette colors 4 / 44%
3.It's OK to mix system palette and Eclipse theme colors 0 / 0%
4.Should give option to use either Eclipse or System color there but not both 3 / 33%

Some applications wrongfully assume that the default system background color is white and build the UI based on that assumption. I am surprised to discover that the new Eclipse versions (e.g. 4.2M6 I am looking at) make that assumption. The new Eclipse UI looks odd and inconsistent Confused with non-white system backgrounds. (see screen-shot).

My advice to the developers is to be consistent. If you want to force white background then do that and ignore system colors. However if you want to rely on the system color palette then don't make assumptions about those colors, e.g. that that the system text background is always white. You either use your own theme with all colors you want or entirely rely on the system theme/palette.

Also the new UI seem to unnecessarily waste more real estate with increased spacing between panels. I sound like a grumpy old man complaining about everything Very Happy

So my question is this. Shouldn't the assumption of a white background color be classified as a bug? What do you think?

[Updated on: Sat, 14 April 2012 18:19]

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #845136 is a reply to message #844978] Sat, 14 April 2012 15:43 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Russell Bateman is currently offline Russell Bateman
Messages: 2711
Registered: July 2009
Location: Provo, Utah, USA
Senior Member
On 2012.04.14 9:45, Yurx Cherio wrote:
> Some application wrongfully assume that the default system background color is white and build the UI based on that assumption. I am surprised to discover that the new Eclipse versions (e.g. 4.2M6 I am looking at) make that assumption. The new Eclipse UI looks odd and inconsistent :? with non-white system backgrounds. (see screenshot).
>
> My advice to the developers is to be consistent. If you want to force white background then do that and ignore system colors. However if you want to rely on the system color palette then don't make assumptions about those colors, e.g. that that the system text background is always white. You either use your own theme with all colors you want or entirely rely on the system theme/palette.
>

I agree: so much so that even earlier versions of Eclipse work badly on
Ubuntu being annoying when not positively unreadable for some situations
(like Javadoc pop-ups, errors, etc.). This has long forced me to adopt
the Clearlooks theme, a white background theme. I have never been able
to adjust the colors via Preferences to any working or acceptable point.
While this doesn't annoy me too much (being forced to adopt this theme
for my entire Ubuntu experience), it's seem a bit ridiculous to force it
on me.

My Windows experience with Eclipse never created this problem for me.
I'm guessing that most Eclipse developers are Windows-oriented.

I'm a white/wheat/light background sort of guy. I'm speaking from
Lucid/Maverick and earlier versions of Ubuntu, also SuSE 10.x. I don't
know what that ghastly Unity desktop brings to the equation.

(Hope my comments aren't too random.)

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #845235 is a reply to message #845136] Sat, 14 April 2012 18:18 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Yurx Cherio is currently offline Yurx Cherio
Messages: 3
Registered: April 2012
Junior Member
Thanks Russell, I forgot to mention that my development environment is Ubuntu. Eclipse versions 3.x also had minor color inconsistencies but those could be fixed via Preferences. I couldn't find a way to adjust the colors in Eclipse 4.x so that they don't conflict with my system background.

What it means to me that instead of migrating to 4.2 I'll be moving on to 3.8. 3.8 also doesn't waste too much space between editors and toolbars. Increased spaces between eclipse views/tabs/editors makes the new version almost unusable on the not-so-large-resolution laptop screens. It may look prettier but I don't run Eclipse to simply look at how pretty it is Razz

[Updated on: Sat, 14 April 2012 18:23]

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #847418 is a reply to message #844978] Tue, 17 April 2012 05:24 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Simon Peeters is currently offline Simon Peeters
Messages: 1
Registered: April 2012
Junior Member
just wondering, did you file a bug? because this clearly is one (having white text on a white/light-gray background in default config is not acceptable by me)

if you do file a bug, can you post a link here?

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #847845 is a reply to message #847418] Tue, 17 April 2012 14:04 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Yurx Cherio is currently offline Yurx Cherio
Messages: 3
Registered: April 2012
Junior Member
I haven't file a bug. I always question myself what if it is only my personal opinion and hence may be subjective. Thanks to your feedback it looks like this an obvious issue and a bug.

Even though I've been using Eclipse for a long time I have never filed bugs against it. I'll try to file one tonight.

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #872214 is a reply to message #844978] Tue, 15 May 2012 13:21 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Ryan P is currently offline Ryan P
Messages: 2
Registered: May 2012
Junior Member
Ran across this in a search, so I figured I'd mention that there is a way to workaround this problem without changing your system theme. You can specify a theme to load when you load an application, like so:

GTK2_RC_FILES=/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/gtkrc eclipse

Replace the path to the gtkrc file with whichever theme you think works best in Eclipse. You can also specify multiple gtkrc files, in case you're using spacing hacks from Indigo or earlier:

GTK2_RC_FILES=/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:~/.eclipseGtkRc eclipse

Though I imagine with the new CSS theming those gtkrc hacks will go away eventually.

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #892541 is a reply to message #844978] Thu, 28 June 2012 10:54 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Karsten Stöckmann is currently offline Karsten Stöckmann
Messages: 2
Registered: June 2012
Junior Member
Yurx Cherio wrote on Sat, 14 April 2012 11:45
[..] The new Eclipse UI looks odd and inconsistent Confused with non-white system backgrounds. (see screen-shot). [..]


Seriously, how did you manage to get your Eclipse looking so 'smooth'? I've just installed Eclipse Juno (4.2 final) on my Ubuntu machine - and it looks quite awful, as you can see in the attached screenshot... *sigh*

(Note that grey-ish main toolbar - this is actually composed of a background image)

Best wishes,
Karsten
  • Attachment: Eclipse.png
    (Size: 56.79KB, Downloaded 1120 times)

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #893200 is a reply to message #892541] Tue, 03 July 2012 03:45 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Archan Paul is currently offline Archan Paul
Messages: 2
Registered: July 2012
Junior Member
Edit following files to get desired results : 

plugins/org.eclipse.platform_4.2.0.v201206081400/css/e4_basestyle.css
plugins/org.eclipse.platform_4.2.0.v201206081400/css/e4_default.css
plugins/org.eclipse.platform_4.2.0.v201206081400/css/e4_default_gtk.css

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #893203 is a reply to message #893200] Tue, 03 July 2012 03:58 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Karsten Stöckmann is currently offline Karsten Stöckmann
Messages: 2
Registered: June 2012
Junior Member
Archan Paul wrote on Tue, 03 July 2012 03:45
Edit following files to get desired results : [..]


Yes, I've done that already - the result is definitely a lot better, though still some weird issues remain (collapsed view area, see screenshot).

Best wishes,
Karsten

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #893727 is a reply to message #893203] Thu, 05 July 2012 07:12 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Archan Paul is currently offline Archan Paul
Messages: 2
Registered: July 2012
Junior Member
I got better result with following changes (I use ArchLinux).

[arp@arpc org.eclipse.platform_4.2.0.v201206081400]$ diff -Nuarp css.orig/ css
diff -Nuarp css.orig/e4_basestyle.css css/e4_basestyle.css
--- css.orig/e4_basestyle.css   2012-06-08 23:54:26.000000000 +0530
+++ css/e4_basestyle.css        2012-07-05 16:35:52.982893152 +0530
@@ -28,7 +28,5 @@
 }
 
 .MToolControl.TrimStack {
-       frame-image:  url(./winXPTSFrame.png);
-       handle-image:  url(./winXPHandle.png);
        frame-cuts: 5px 1px 5px 16px;
 }
diff -Nuarp css.orig/e4_default.css css/e4_default.css
--- css.orig/e4_default.css     2012-06-08 23:54:26.000000000 +0530
+++ css/e4_default.css  2012-07-05 16:36:08.852894190 +0530
@@ -31,7 +31,6 @@
 
 
 .MTrimBar#org-eclipse-ui-main-toolbar  {
-    background-image:  url(./winXPBlue.png);
 }
 
 .MPartStack.active {
diff -Nuarp css.orig/e4_default_gtk.css css/e4_default_gtk.css
--- css.orig/e4_default_gtk.css 2012-06-08 23:54:26.000000000 +0530
+++ css/e4_default_gtk.css      2012-07-05 16:36:26.069561984 +0530
@@ -16,12 +16,9 @@
 }
 
 .MTrimBar#org-eclipse-ui-main-toolbar  {
-    background-image:  url(./gtkGrey.png);
 }
 
 .MToolControl.TrimStack {
-       frame-image:  url(./gtkTSFrame.png);
-       handle-image:  url(./gtkHandle.png);
 }
 
 .MPartStack.active {

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #893909 is a reply to message #844978] Thu, 05 July 2012 20:27 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Dalton Pelc is currently offline Dalton Pelc
Messages: 1
Registered: July 2012
Junior Member
This is seriously crap. According to the wiki and a few other places, these CSS themes are now some sort of core part of eclipse. They don't load properly and they override only like 20% of my original workspace settings (Intentionally, according to the wiki!)

Now my eclipse is half black on black and half white on white. It can't even figure out the right way to load colors.

I tried switching themes around, to see if any would load my system colors, and not only do none of them load my system colors but they also improperly unload/reload each other. So the XP olive theme will have an orange bar at the top, and if I go to another theme that DOESN'T have a bar it will now be a combo of the two themes put together.

There is no documentation on what is what either in the existing themes, so I just have to play with it and completely restart eclipse every time. I tried out a live CSS theme editor specifically made by the team for eclipse and it appears to do nothing. I have to restart anyway.

About 2 weeks ago I was just complaining about IDEA to my friends, and why one of the reasons I preferred eclipse over IDEA or netbeans was that they actually used common sense and loaded ALL of the colors from your system colors instead of only half. Well now all three IDEs just do what they want so I guess I either need to learn to fiddle with it for hours, or give up and go back to a normal white theme.

Argh. If this isn't the place for this rant let me know. I'm just incredibly frustrated right now.

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #894140 is a reply to message #893909] Fri, 06 July 2012 17:54 Go to previous messageGo to next message
alex hutter is currently offline alex hutter
Messages: 1
Registered: July 2012
Junior Member
I totally agree with everything that Dalton said. I really struggle to read some colour combinations, particularly ones that are very bright and stark as my eyes are quite sensitive to bright light. I considerer it an important accessibility feature for applications to carefully follow the system colour pallet.

Fortunately it seems this this problem is trivial to fix: simply delete all the .css files in `${eclipse.home}plugins/org.eclipse.platform_4.2.0.v201206081400/css' and restart Eclipse. 　ばんざい! System colours restored. ^^

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #900653 is a reply to message #894140] Tue, 07 August 2012 21:12 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Mladen Sekara is currently offline Mladen Sekara
Messages: 4
Registered: August 2012
Junior Member
alex hutter wrote on Fri, 06 July 2012 17:54
I totally agree with everything that Dalton said. I really struggle to read some colour combinations, particularly ones that are very bright and stark as my eyes are quite sensitive to bright light. I considerer it an important accessibility feature for applications to carefully follow the system colour pallet.

Fortunately it seems this this problem is trivial to fix: simply delete all the .css files in `${eclipse.home}plugins/org.eclipse.platform_4.2.0.v201206081400/css' and restart Eclipse. 　ばんざい! System colours restored. ^^



I had the same problem, spent too much time trying to make it look accessible.
Deleting css dir worked like a charm.
Thanks.

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Re: Eclipse Juno themes [message #1020557 is a reply to message #844978] Mon, 18 March 2013 09:06 Go to previous message
hooluupog Mising name is currently offline hooluupog Mising name
Messages: 3
Registered: October 2011
Junior Member
I totally agree with all of you and this is definitely a bug.Currently eclipse is using system colors and eclipse theme colors meanwhile which causes a theme confliction(e.g. windows 7 default aero theme with dark eclipse juno theme).After installing dark theme(github.com/eclipse-color-theme/eclipse-ui-themes)for eclipse 4.2 sr2,there are still some weird issues:
- Console colors don't fit
- Scrollbar colors don't fit
- Table head row colors under "Problems" doesn't fit.
Screenshot as follows:
index.php/fa/13902/0/index.php/fa/13903/0/
Nowadays, vs 2011(wpf based),netbeans 7.3.1(swing based) and intellij idea 12(swing based) have a full-featured high-quality and consistent dark theme except eclipse(swt based).
Attach iintellij idea's darcula theme for comparison.
index.php/fa/13904/0/
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[Updated on: Mon, 18 March 2013 09:12]

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