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In the preference dialog, under General > Appearance, we should hide themes for other platforms by default in the theme selection dropdown. From Lars Vogel on Bug 562221: "They were explicitly added in the past but I think we should add a checkbox: 'Show themes for other OSs' and show them only if selected by the user in the dialog.
Just to give a potential hint with solving this bug: Here is a patch which detects if the user is on Linux (GTK) https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/154753/4/org.eclipse.ui.editors/src/org/eclipse/ui/internal/editors/text/TextEditorDefaultsPreferencePage.java
The reason is that some people did want the Linux theme on Windows. What bug would hiding them solve? What added value would it offer. IMO, it's not worth the effort as it increases complexity of the UI for not substantial benefit.
PMC decided that showing the OS specific themes is more confusing than helpful and that we shoud remove them. No preference is needed.
(In reply to Mickael Istria from comment #2) > The reason is that some people did want the Linux theme on Windows. > What bug would hiding them solve? What added value would it offer. > IMO, it's not worth the effort as it increases complexity of the UI for not > substantial benefit. We should improve the Windows theme. Opened https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=551462 for this.
(In reply to Lars Vogel from comment #3) > PMC decided that showing the OS specific themes is more confusing than > helpful and that we shoud remove them. No preference is needed. I think PMC is making a mistake here and that decreases the value of the IDE. Offering multiple themes is a way to mitigate the "default theme sucks" issue that's quite frequent on Windows (more than with other OSs) by offering alternatives. > We should improve the Windows theme. Opened https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=551462 for this. Sure, but in the meantime, it has been horrible for years, and no one has worked on some redesign. I don't get why that would suddenly change and why preventing from offering alternatives. Note that the themes are *not* OS specific, they happen to "map" the usual default OS settings, they're... themes, not bound to OS, just like one can decide to use some Mac-inspired theme on Gnome.
(In reply to Mickael Istria from comment #5) > Sure, but in the meantime, it has been horrible for years, and no one has > worked on some redesign. I don't get why that would suddenly change Because I started using Windows for learning video recording. ;-) I already pushed a Gerrit patch which makes Windows toolbar styling theme IMHO much better (and similar to the Linux theming).
Change that needs to be reverted: https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/112516/9/bundles/org.eclipse.e4.ui.css.swt.theme/src/org/eclipse/e4/ui/css/swt/internal/theme/ThemeEngine.java
New Gerrit change created: https://git.eclipse.org/r/161673
*** Bug 562223 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to Mickael Istria from comment #5) > (In reply to Lars Vogel from comment #3) > > PMC decided that showing the OS specific themes is more confusing than > > helpful and that we shoud remove them. No preference is needed. > > I think PMC is making a mistake here and that decreases the value of the > IDE. Offering multiple themes is a way to mitigate the "default theme sucks" > issue that's quite frequent on Windows (more than with other OSs) by > offering alternatives. Offering more alternatives when we fail to maintain and improve even the default ones is not helping streamline the efforts. I can see the point in having this as hidden gem (hidden behind system property? for people working on themes so comparisons are easy and etc.). Offering more and more themes is not the way to go - this started from proposal to have additional themes/options for rounded and square ctabfolder rendering. That would have doubled the current themes and going that path we would have to add search field in the combo soon enough. > > > We should improve the Windows theme. Opened https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=551462 for this. > > Sure, but in the meantime, it has been horrible for years, and no one has > worked on some redesign. I don't get why that would suddenly change and why > preventing from offering alternatives. We see a change right now so let's see how long Windows theme improvements will continue. > Note that the themes are *not* OS specific, they happen to "map" the usual > default OS settings, they're... themes, not bound to OS, just like one can > decide to use some Mac-inspired theme on Gnome. This is almost true - but they also contain specifics which can make the theme look really inconsistent. E.g. the gtk theme has definitions about themes selected/unselected/etc. tab colors as gtk doesn't manage these but cocoa does as they are not defined there. This could lead to inconsistent selection colors on cocoa if gtk theme used. And probably there are more like that. So while in general themes are mapping colors only - they are not tested for other platforms so we shouldn't offer them to users by default.
In our Eclipse based product, we have added our own dark theme and the list of themes has grown substantially and confuses users. You can't say themes have nothing to do with OS if we have 3 dark themes that are tuned to each OS and have tags like (Windows) and (Linux)... To be honest. I would prefer a mechanism to completely remove all platform contributed themes so that our product could offer only it's own themes and those downloaded by users.
So this bug is basically a revert of https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=527806 ? I am okay with that...
Thanks Lakshmi and Matthias for checking.
Gerrit change https://git.eclipse.org/r/161673 was merged to [master]. Commit: http://git.eclipse.org/c/platform/eclipse.platform.ui.git/commit/?id=a2b5924f14a3865dae0f8939d34a5c45ce41e36d
