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----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ned Twigg" <ned.twigg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: "Discussions about the IDE" <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Friday, 16 September, 2016 1:51:23 AM
> Subject: 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?
FWIW, I'm now aware of any (SWT at least) committer whose priority is Dark theme and surely not for any of the Red Hat SWT committers. Yes, we do fix many issues there but at the end these are bugs with various setters or not properly adapting to latest changes in underlying UI toolkits.
And these bugs manifest on every theme e.g. on light themes it's few various shades of grey instead of black and grey on dark. Both look terrible and amateurish and are real usability issues as some components become unusable/unreadable on light themes even.
I would strongly encourage everyone to consider contributing in the area he thinks is most important as that's the only way to make a difference. Contributors spending their own time scratch their own itch. Contributors paid to do so have a really clear set of priorities e.g. webkit2 and wayland support is what comes in Fedora 25 and that's what's expected from some of us. It's not that these are set in stone but this is not the channel to influence them - e.g. a customer reporting a dark theme issue with a product will have higher priority for obvious reasons.
> 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
> https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=497562
>
> 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
> 540-336-8043
> 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
>
> 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 My blog - My Tweets
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--
Alexander Kurtakov
Red Hat Eclipse team
