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Re: [ide-dev] e4 debate
Have we ever done a survey to see how important dark theme is to users?  How they stack it against responsiveness, ease-of-plugin development, etc?  I'm sure some users say it's their #1 issue, but definitely not all of them.

It appears that Lars and Ian are some of the most talented committers we have.  Are we sure their time wouldn't be better spent on other issues?  Obviously, it's up to them to decide how to spend their time, not me.  But I'd like to make a final plea :)

Facebook, GitHub, StackOverflow, Box, DropBox, iOS - none of these products support themes.  Do some of their users want themes?  Sure!  But even they only have so many development resources.  Once a platform supports a theme, everything that plugs into it also has to support themes, so it puts a burden on the entire ecosystem.

IntelliJ, SublimeText, VSCode - these all support themes.  And they all do so by using a UI technology which is fundamentally themable, but also fundamentally slower than SWT.  They get themes for free, but they have to work hard to get performance and accessibility.  Eclipse still wins the keypress-responsiveness competition.

Software isn't always about tradeoffs - sometimes you can improve something to the point that it's just fundamentally better than its competitors.  When the Eclipse CSS engine was conceived, it wasn't clear that it might not be easy to use Windows MFC to create a platform which is just as themable as Swing or JavaFX or Web.  But we've run the experiment for 6 years, and it's turned out to be very expensive, and still incomplete.  Anytime we say yes to something, we say no to every other thing we could have done with that time.  I'm baffled by the priority that dark theme has gotten with our most capable committers - aren't there other usability issues which rank higher?
ᐧ

Ned Twigg
Lead Software Architect, DiffPlug LLC
540-336-8043
340 S Lemon Ave #3433, Walnut, CA 91789

On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 2:13 PM, Patrik Suzzi <psuzzi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi, 

Here is the umbrella bug for Dark Theme: Bug 497562 - [Dark Theme] Improve Dark theme in Eclipse Neon

As we're speaking, Ian and Lars are providing patches. 
Let's review them! :)

Best Regards,
Patrik Suzzi

On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 11:09 PM, Pascal Rapicault <pascal@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Come on Fabio..... SWT..... I think you are failing to realize the state of the world in UI toolkit, JVM performance, hardware performance back in 1999/2000....

If you and the many others who think that could have done better back then, then it is time to show the world your awesomeness and fix up Eclipse to help it regain its shine from the early days.

Meanwhile, I'll be watching your code quality :)



On 9/15/2016 1:49 PM, Fabio Zadrozny wrote:
Ned,

I must say that having a decent dark theme nowadays is a minimum requirement to lots of users (there's a reason for http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/eclipse-moonrise-ui-theme being #6 and http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/eclipse-color-theme is #4 in the eclipse marketplace), and also a reason why so many users flocked to Intellij after it released the darcula theme or to other environments such as sublimetext with a better dark theme.

Personally, I think that Eclipse can't thrive without a proper dark theme (yes, I think that it's unfortunate that the creation of SWT was done in the first place, as besides making an IDE Eclipse development also has to support a UI Widget toolkit, but history is history, we should look forward here, and currently, fixing the remaining issues -- namely: table headers, buttons and themed scrollbars -- at least on windows -- is probably less work than changing to another direction -- although making those fixes in SWT is an uphill battle because they're not native on the platform, so, even with a working patch, it's probably really hard to get accepted in SWT).

Cheers,

Fabio

On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Ned Twigg <ned.twigg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It's a difficult debate to have, but I think it's unlikely that the best path forward will involve only "new stuff".  Sometimes cutting out old stuff is necessary to concentrate resources, and that will require an honest assessment of technical results.

For years, planeteclipse has been peppered with screenshots where Eclipse with Windows MFC widgets is slowly getting darker.  It was a worthwhile experiment to run: "Can we make native widgets as flexible as HTML/CSS", and the answer turns out to be "with the resources we have, it will take more than 6 years".  Maybe I'm giving up too soon and it's gonna look fantastic in year 8.  Or maybe, if we say "the theming engine is now an opt-in experiment, not a default", we would find that there are more resources available to squash more mundane UX issues.

Ned Twigg
Lead Software Architect, DiffPlug LLC
340 S Lemon Ave #3433, Walnut, CA 91789

On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 8:59 AM, Eric Moffatt <emoffatt@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

+1 (especially the beer part...;-)....just had to take a try at defending my baby. I'm extremely encourages to see the extent of the interest in moving forward.

Eric

Inactive hide details for Doug Schaefer ---09/15/2016 11:52:35 AM---I’m not sure how helpful this debate is. We have ended up Doug Schaefer ---09/15/2016 11:52:35 AM---I’m not sure how helpful this debate is. We have ended up where we are. There’s a new crop of contri

From: Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Discussions about the IDE <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 09/15/2016 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: [ide-dev] e4 debate
Sent by: ide-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx




I’m not sure how helpful this debate is. We have ended up where we are. There’s a new crop of contributors that have been working hard and bringing Eclipse forward. We’re headed in the right direction.

I got to know the platform committers in Ottawa very well over the years and was at the e4 Summit that kicked it all off. They had their hearts in the right place and were trying to do what they though was the right thing. But that’s over and we need to look forward.

Happy to talk more on the subject, but I and you need a beer in our hands :).

Doug.

From: <ide-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Discussions about the IDE <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thursday, September 15, 2016 at 11:41 AM
To: "ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx" <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [ide-dev] e4 debate
      On 09/15/2016 05:17 PM, Eric Moffatt wrote:
          The idea of e4 was to simplify the platform code to the point where we could allow contributors to 'get in the game' and to be *successful*. It's worth noting in this context that in 2015 the Platform UI project was voted the 'Most Open' having garnered many new committers from diverse sources (I'm not sure but I suspect we have more now than ever before).
      As a relatively new regular contributor to Platform UI, I must say that what made the project more open to me are more the changes about releng (move to Tycho) and contribution infra (Hudson, Gerrit) than the move to e4. On the "higher level" parts of the IDE (Wizard, views, and very user-oriented things more than core, performance and so on), I currently didn't perceive any benefit of e4 and I never have the opportunity to take advantage of its features. My only attempt so far (adding a context-menu to the main toolbar) of adding some extensibility and tweaking some renderer is currently still a failure.
      I do not question whether e4 was necessary or not, I'd just like to share that in my opinion, e4 still fails at provided huge value for developing the Eclipse IDE, has definitely cost a lot of resources that end-users would rather have seen placed elsewhere, and that it's not what has caused the recent boost in the contributions to Platform UI.
          As for the reason for the drop off I'd point to the decision of Apple to go with Android Studio as being the turning point, followed by the current unrelenting marketing campaign from JetBrains...
      s/Apple/Google, but yeah, overall I agree.
      But about JetBrains, it's not about Marketing, it's really about a very good strategy in their product that has allowed them to deliver a good functional quality. They've basically implemented years ago what we're still discussing here (solid factorization of common parts - editors, commands, views...), so they can simply create nice features for new technos faster than we can do now. We're just paying the price of the Tragedy of Commons, and luckily, there are now enough motivated contributors to succeed on this challenge!
      --
      Mickael Istria
      Eclipse developer for       Red Hat Developers
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