This thread has been created inspired on the E16 light theme thread
Well all know the E16 dark theme, which is also very pleasant, complete, and beautiful...
But I simply wanted to open this thread to hear about suggestions and possible things to fix / improve
For example, maybe its only issue is that the fonts are pretty small? (this is in fact also a feature, more things can fit in the screen, and allows small screens to not have overlapped windows), but maybe to be a default setting they should be a bit bigger...
For me fonts got right (but I know I have quite good eyes)...
I tends each time to lower the size of Cairo-Dock icons (around 26)...
As already said in the alter-ego thread, for me, dark theme is not only an aesthetic point, but readability & energy saving ones...
Well, in one way, I complains several releases ago of small fonts, but I had appreciated to see them back again in 3.7.9 even in my 10" screen, (in fact, I must go to doctor to review my eyes because I can't read those are close to me, but also in last trips in Belgium I discovered that numbers in red in my GPS when I pass speed limit are readable by day but not by night, so I really need to check my eyes more that ask you to change Elive's font size)
So I confirm you, in small screens, now with the smaller font that we had in first alphas looks is better than with the biggest ones so please, leave them as they are now in 3.7.9, is the ideal compromise I think
Same gripe as in light theme: There are icons missing in the menu!
The fonts in the menu are set to "centered" (JUSTIFICATION 512 in "textclasses.cfg) which gets ,messy when the text line is long and looks jumbled.
Also it should use the same font as the cairo-dock menu i.e (DejaVu)Sans
well, as an end note, is not possible to satisfy everybody in e16 about font sizes (they are not dynamic, this is much better implemented in elive 3.0)
I don't know if is a good thing or a bad thing, but I increased the fonts of the menus one point (it looks pretty different! i should probably get used for a while... )
They're the sans fonts introduced by "fancy-menus"
They are the fonts set by the DarkOne theme.
In the "enlightenment , settings" menu and "themes" tab I do have "use theme font configuration" set to enabled
If I uncheck that, then my light-theme fonts go very, very small but the DarkOne slightly larger than before. Not by much though, you can hardly see it.
I do but I installed "fancy menus" as "persistent" so they overwrite the perl-tool menus on logging in or "restarting" e16. I'm quite happy with that.
This was done in "/usr/share/e16/themes/DarkOne/textclasses.cfg" by setting _JUSTIFICATION 0 (twice ! ) for MENU_TEXT entry.
yeah I was referring only to darkone fonts they are updated to be a bit larger for menus
mmh, ok let me explain how your "own menus" should be made instead , make a look to:
sudo scite /usr/share/e16/scripts/e_gen_menu
line 115 & 124, next to these ones you should add a line similar to the commented one in 129, this will add a submenu entry, then this submenu file will be a static menu that you made (or a bunch of submenus, etc etc), btw it should be a different name, user_apps.menu is also regenerated but is a useless menu
then, to integrate it in elive what we need is an extra code in that perl script that:
checks if this file exists and contains at least 1 line that is not a comment
if so, adds that user static menu to the main menu, otherwise, ignores it
ah nice!
I have also see that from imageclasses/menustyles.cfg you can change the padding of the elements (requires purge cache's + E reload), but between the text and the icon it doesn't seems to take effect
Yeah, tried that too. The only way I could find (and apparently also the way the previous Gem and Topaz did it) is to have those spaces in the text.
It's not illogic as the menu expands to the size of the string.
Like I stated elsewhere, I think it's better to do that in a separate script.
Dynamic adding of whitespace is fairly easy with sed but finding the xpm icons (a fault in the e_gen script) is another.
E_gen_menu is an e16 script and can change with upgrades without being noticed by us. A separate script is safer IMO.
spaces between icons and text fixed in the updated e16 package, the perl script adds the needed spaces it looks way better now!
darkone theme now align menus to the left
About XPM icons @triantares, we should forget this approach, xpm is bugged and it wont work on new enlightenment too, so its just better to add the needed icons for the missing apps instead
By icons I was primarily looking at icons for the categories in "file.menu" i.e the main menu.
There aren't any there while the cairo-dock menu does use them.
I found most in "/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/categories/".
For the .xpm icons we'd have to find alternative .png icons and name them appropriately for the script to work. Some apps (especially in Games) are so old that they've only got .xpm ones. But then again there aren't that many.
That would/could pose a problem if a new category is created by installing an app (like encryption) e_gen_menus would add the without an icon.
I'm not 100% in the clear why the script needs/creates ".e16/menus/menus_apps/index.menu" for .e16/menus/file.menu" generation but maybe there's a possibility there.
@triantares I'm finishing to assign automatic icons to menu entries too in the generator:
about the "new categories", they should be not created (instead, they should be put on the specific other default category), for that, you need to add the name of the newer category in the CatsRemove list and see if it is then moved to the correct one (then, tell me the name of the wrong one to add it to the generator script)
I see your icons to look a bit bigger (and so better), where is the conf to change the icons size of the menus?
I don't know.
I suspect that icons are defined by the font size.
UPDATE. It definitely is the font size.
After doing "apug" I created a new user and logged in there to see what menus does.
Default theme DarkOne generates this menu:
And the Elive-GTK-light looks like this:
I do not think there's much difference in size there, except that light stuff on dark background always look smaller.
Now with "use theme font" checked:
And the look goes to this:
Which is a lot bigger.
Looks like @Rebel450 was right: Your fonts are too small !
they are updated to be a bit larger for menus
