Using Audacity 2.4.2 under a flavor of Debian, I’ve been enjoying the mystery of solving the “ImageCache” puzzle. But am stumped.
In the attached sketch, I’m trying to find how to color the areas that I have highlighted in magenta?
I’ve seen the commentary about certain aspects being tied into your operating system’s desktop, AND JUST TO BE ABUNDANTLY Clear, I’m not worried about the window frame, header. footer, scroll bar, or the main menu. I’ve experimented with my operating system settings and am confident that those items ARE subject to desktop settings. What I’m concerned with here for the purposes of this thread are just the 7 listboxes that are specific to Audacity functionality, and physically all situated within the application GUI.
I see, well thanks…I guess that means you are using Gnome?
I’ve been using KDE, and adjusting every available setting to a dark background colors everything except those “combo boxes”
Oh well, at least I have the comfort of knowing that I’m not missing an easy fix.
It is, however, a shame that the application developers chose that route. Personally I’d be much happier if they had employed the same element as in the buttons for the track control panel. (fwiw) Track name button also has drop down menus, so a similar implementation for the 7 boxes does not seem like an extravagant expectation.
Just seems odd they would go to so much length to provide the ImageCache.png level of customization (which is nice), and yet leave such a glaring area within the confines of their GUI, subject to the whims of external influences.
Audacity is currently built using the WxWidgets cross-platform toolkit. WxWidgets is supposed to give “native look and feel” to cross-platform applications, so that it looks like a Windows app on Windows, a macOS app on macOS, … WxWidgets provides standard controls, such as menus, buttons, sliders, … which are derived from the host platform. Those parts inherit theme colours from the host OS. Custom parts of the app need to be themed separately, which is what the ImageCache is for. As you can see, in the case of Audacity there’s a lot of custom parts to the GUI.
Well, in any event, while I didn’t get the answer I had hoped for, at least I no longer have to wonder what I’m overlooking. Afterall, it IS an audio program.
At some time in the future, this will all change as the developers intend to stop using WxWidgets and use Qt instead. Theming is handled very differently in Qt. No time schedule has been given for this change.
I really just did not like the default offerings that came with the Audacity standard install, so where I am now is a “happy place” compared to previously.
I’m sure there is at least a smidge of sour grapes in what I’m about to say… but if “system integration” was the upmost priority for the development team, then perhaps they also could have incorporated the base system’s “selection” colors into the Audacity GUI as well? (I’m being facetious)
There is an issue logged a while back for this in GitHub.
Many parts of Dark theme Audacity are not really “dark” #1296
I logged this last July - but no-one has yet picked this up to fix it. But you can see from further down the thread that MUSE have this on their roadmap for Audacity 4.0 (which will be a while off yet).
I’ve also got an old Windows 7 installation, resident on the same machine. And just for self amusement I booted Win 7 in I don’t recall how long. And installed my personal ImageCache.png file in it. And I’ll have to concede that the developers succeeded admirably in that regard. I’m as fond of those 7 combo boxes under windows, as I am under Linux.
but if “system integration” was the upmost priority for the development team, then perhaps they also could have incorporated the base system’s “selection” colors into the Audacity GUI as well? 