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With very, very little work you can get Adwaita to behave similarly to “Material You”, with tinted but legibly-contrasted colors based on the user’s selected accent color or a brand color.
I’ve been trying this out experimentally in Clairvoyant, and just pushed it a little more in Butler—this time, based on a selected color to match your Home Assistant dashboard rather than your OS accent color.
First thought is that the light mode "input area" could use with an off-white color.
Nothing insane just something to lighten the blow.
@cassidy I've thought of working on a shared XDG spec for colorschemes. It would have some specific values, such as background, foreground, link color, accent color etc. Avoiding adding too many, but just enough that people can make it work for their needs.
This would be nice for people like me who kinda need their custom colorscheme to work with. Not because of aesthetic reasons (though they're a plus) but I have made this set of colors over the years because otherwise I have very hard time concentrating and/or reading things.
Having somekind of shared spec that would allow me to use this across applications would make me happy.
The spec could maybe have the list of colors depicted here, give or take, and rest of them could be generated on the fly.
@cassidy That's so cool! I always wanted something to tint gnome with the accent color.
@calvicii you can play with this in Clairvoyant:
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.cassidyjames.clairvoyant
It’s pretty subtle, but let me know what you think! App developers can absolutely opt into doing something like this today, but my main question is… should they? 🤔 I’m still not actually sure—and then there’s still the question about when to use the user’s accent color versus doing your own thing in your app.
@calvicii what I recorded in the video will be coming to the next release of Butler, once CI and everything makes that happen within the next few hours or so. :)
I intentionally chose some non-ideal colors in that video, by the way; basically anything except a color that’s super close to white in a light style or black in a dark style still just… works!
This ability is the result of a ton of work from @alice (and I’m sure others!) working on GTK and Adwaita. It’s really fun to play with and think about the possibilities here.
It’s nice to see the technical barriers to this kind of styling mostly eliminated. What remains are more… big platform design questions. Like:
• is this something most people would *want* apps to do across the whole platform by default?
• where is the line between expressive app design and platform consistency?
• should apps default to the user’s accent color, or should they be encouraged to do their own brand colors?
I’m not sure! But it’s fun to play. :)
This does make me think we could *probably* support arbitrary accent color in GNOME w/o much fanfare or issue. Maybe just when set via the portal, but continue exposing the existing colors in Settings?
Not tinting everything like this by default, but just accepting the arbitrary color, doing some simple math to ensure contrast, and then leaning on the fancy CSS color stuff to make sure everything works out. Sure, someone could pick an ugly color. But they can also pick an ugly wallpaper…
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