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Comment by _trampeltier | Hacker News Reader

Back then you also could create your own theme. You could set the colors for text, backround, buttons etc. and every App did respect and use it. Today you can choose dark or light mode and almost no App does respect it, instead they bring there own colors and options.

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I've been a theme creator for a few decades now, and modifying how programs looked is what got me into development in the first place 30 years ago. The constant stripping of user definable visuals in modern computing is a legitimately depressing thing for me to see happen. It's just another step along the "you don't own the device or the software, we're just letting you borrow it" path.

The constant push with SAAS and cloud-based data and all the rest, just makes me think we're heading back towards a terminal/mainframe environment and soon we'll be "consuming" the Internet in the same way we consume interactive Cable TV.

FWIW, one redeeming characteristic of SaaS web apps is that most of the time, you can fix up their crap UIs with liberal application of CSS (via e.g. Stylus extension). It's something I find myself doing increasingly often - usually not to make things look different, but to undo some dumb design decisions like low density, whitespace-rich presentation, or hidden video controls.

Unfortunately, this does not give the ability to do system-wide restyling of the kind _trampeltier mentioned. Despite professions to the contrary, almost nothing whatsoever on the web is in any way semantic. Each website is its own assortment of CSS hacks hooked up to a tree of randomly nested, randomly named divs. You can't just write one style that says "please stop with the whitespace around media boxes", you have to unbreak each site individually, because a "media box" isn't really a website-independent thing, and neither is a button.

Is there any sort of a "marketplace" where people can upload and vote on alternative CSS themes for any given site? That would be cool.

An alternative to the Stylus extension that the parent comment mentions is the Stylish extension, which has a "marketplace" almost exactly what you're looking for. You don't even need the Stylish extension as each theme is also offered as a userscript.

https://userstyles.org

Yeah, there's that; I wasn't sure about affiliation status between userstyles.org and Stylish.

FWIW, I still recommend installing Stylus instead of Stylish - the difference is that at some point, Stylish changed owner and acquired analytics; Stylus is a fork that's free of privacy-invading antifeatures.

agreed man, have fond memories of tweaking themes for daily drivers like irc client, winamp foobar2000, compared to like spotify or discord now feels so neutered and limited in terms of customizing appearance.

Yeah and everything now is so disjointed. It shits me. Eg not only can’t you customise Spotify or Discord visually, but they don’t even respect the OS controls. You can’t resize them properly to fit windows 10 tiling, the menus are a broken mess, etc.

They insist on doing everything themselves and ignoring all standards which just ends up looking ugly and broken.

One of my main passions in theming is making your entire system look cohesively styled. Hell, I’d rather have standard Windows look but every program using the system UI so at least it all looks the same. I despise Spotify, Discord, and all Electron apps for this reason. They look so amateurish.

Same here. And it's not just theming. Windows has always had a lot of small, lesser-known conventions around UI elements, some accessibility features, and a way for additional software to hook up to the UI. None of that is respected when an application decides to draw its own UI on a canvas.

Yeah and with Windows 10 you can't even set the title bar color to be black unless you either download 3rd party tools or hack around in your registry.

On the bright side, with native Linux you can customize everything. It's so fun to customize your window manager, status bar, etc. and have everything look and work exactly how you want.

In early 2000s, I used to make Windows applications with embedded IE browser and used system colors for CSS to make the whole UI look native. I believe it still works [0] but I don't think I've seen it in a long time on any site.

[0] https://www.sitepoint.com/css-system-styles/

I tried it recently and its pretty random. The different names means different things depending on the os and browser combo and does not take into account user defined theme colors. So while the idea is great, the implementations are broken.

Thank you so much for sharing this!

It is just what I needed.

YES.

Under Windows I created and used a "dark" theme in 1991, nearly identical to what the canned Mac OS "dark" one is today. Used it well into the 2000s.

Microsoft REMOVED that capability in what, Vista? And now that everyone has finally realized how stupid inverse color schemes are, the color-scheme editor is totally gone from Windows. It was in there for a decade and a half or more.

They also removed the "blue background, white text" option from Word, just a couple years ago.

Windows is an execrable mess now.

Apple, which forced an inverse color scheme on its users for 30+ years, has at least granted them some relief. But it's still pathetic to hobble a OS's UI with hard-coded color schemes.

what do you dislike about inverted colors?

also white text on blue- ouch.

Do not worry for the market is ready for this. Iphone started with fixed backgrounds, then later they demonstrated the oh so amazing feature of custom backgrounds. In some 80s computer chronicles episode you can find the ex-act-same-speech from a windows sales rep explaining how win 1.0 was limited, but now you can set up your own background pattern. iOS 15 will introduce ML generated computer vision trained custom themed that fits the most seen colours in your rooms.

Yes, it's funny when some new app announces "now we have dark mode!" with much fanfare and commotion, when the ability to adjust the colours and appearance of individual UI elements across the whole OS was the norm back in Windows 3.

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...

If the apps celebrating their new dark mode feature would use the OS GUI toolkit they wouldn't have to worry about that. Many "modern" desktop apps rely on web based technology which throws them back ages in terms of UI and UX

Many "modern" desktop apps rely on web based technology which throws them back ages in terms of UI and UX

For an even more WTF experience, look at how CSS had defined how web apps could use the system-defined colours for UI elements, but then it was deprecated due to a very thin "insufficient" and "security/privacy" argument:

https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/#deprecated-system-colors

Obviously they could be made sufficient (imagine if JS was deprecated because it was deemed "insufficient" for making applications behave natively...), and things like Electron could use them without worrying about "security" since it's not in pages served over the network.

(That "security/privacy" argument is really thin, especially when considering how much less customisable the colours have become in newer OSs!)

Unfortunately, "because security!" is currently a trump card that wins all arguments. On the one hand I get it, security has been pretty neglected in the industry over the past decades, but I think we also really ought to have a conversation about the costs of security.

The ultimate state of perfect security for a system is a dead rock. Everything that's interesting and useful can only happen in the state of some lack of security.

Strictly speaking, they also have to be compiled against a new enough SDK to get Dark Mode support via the native GUI widgets. For apps that need backward compatibility, that can get hairy. (But yeah, that’s nothing compared to what Electron has wrought.)

It was there in the first version, even.

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...

Windows 3 themes never worked that well though. Dark mode is a single Boolean flag, which is much easier for application developers to follow.

Dark mode is a single Boolean flag, which is much easier for application developers to follow.

The whole point is that application developers don't even have to care about it if they do things right, by using the OS's UI controls they will automatically be drawn with whatever colour the user has set.

But in reality, apps didn't perfectly follow the theme, and an attempt at "dark" theming resulted in big bright splotches of white on your CRT monitor.

That was a problem then, but today, you'd think cases like this would be immediately reported as bugs on the issue trackers. Unfortunately, while we've gained in the development support tooling and speed of software distribution, we've also lost the basic sanity of GUI implementation.

App developers didn't even have to set colors.

You could tell the ones who didn't know what they were doing by the invisible text littering their UIs under some color schemes. This continued into the Web era. There were tons of defective sites that overrode your system background color with a hard-coded white background, but didn't bother setting the text color to black.

The result was invisible text on any system with a "dark" (non-inverse) color scheme. DUHHHH

There are probably still millions of such sites today, but now UIs are so gimped that they hide the defect.

For some reason, the new gimp version has a dark mode layout with an almost black, gray background

But the file dialogs have black text. You can hardly read anything

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