Bug 329435

Summary:	Configurable UI colors
Product:	[Applications] amarok	Reporter:	Thomas Mitterfellner <thomas>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Amarok Bugs <amarok-bugs-null>
Status:	REPORTED ---
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	achimxm369
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	2.8.0
Target Milestone:	2.9
Platform:	unspecified
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments:	Patch that makes list views uniformly white Screenshot showing plain white background

Description Thomas Mitterfellner 2013-12-30 19:02:15 UTC

In amarok's playlist/collection tree, every other line is colored (styled) differently from the previous one. This style makes it very hard for me to orientate myself visually (also, it horribly reminds me of 80's style continuous paper for dot-matrix printers (o;).
As of now, these colors can only be configured on a global scope (one color corresponds to "Normal Background"  from "Window" category, and the other one to "Alternate Background" from the "View" category). 
But even when I set those two to the same colors, /still/ every other line is subtly different (as I gathered from reading the source, that's because of some hard-coded transparency magic), plus – and that is even more important to me – to get my preferred contrast in those list views, I would have to change the window background color of all other  applications, which unfortunately ruins the contrast for these other applications!

I've hacked around this problem by applying the _horrible_ patch I'll attach to this message (which is of course not meant to be implemented that way in amarok, but rather to demonstrate the end result I would like to be able to achieve).

I would really appreciate it if you could implement some possibility to configure these interface colors separately from the global color configuration (and probably offer the possibility to deactivate the striped list layouts altogether) because this would really improve amarok's usability/accessibility.
For comparison, you could have a look at how interface colors may be configured in Krusader (though I'd also welcome of course a different/less complete solution).

Thank you for reading!

Reproducible: Always

Actual Results:  
Playlist is striped/partly uses global window background color

Expected Results:  
Playlist's rows should be configurable to be of uniform, user-definable color, separate from the global colors.

Comment 1 Thomas Mitterfellner 2013-12-30 19:05:15 UTC

Created attachment 84353 [details]
Patch that makes list views uniformly white

Meant for demonstration purposes only

Comment 2 Myriam Schweingruber 2014-08-14 19:27:11 UTC

Could you please provide a screenshot on how this would look? I have a hard time imagining how this would look without the lines. 

And I also have difficulties to imagine how it would enhance visibility, I tried configuring my playlist to have the same background color for both lines and it just looks horrible and much less readable.

Comment 3 Thomas Mitterfellner 2014-08-14 20:53:34 UTC

Created attachment 88259 [details]
Screenshot showing plain white background

Screenshot attached.
It would be even better if the thin lines between the items could be made invisible.

Comment 4 Myriam Schweingruber 2014-08-15 18:47:43 UTC

Well, to be honest, I find this much worse than what we have now, I very much doubt that any dev would want to change it to have all white, it is neither good looking nor is it easy to read. At least with the alternate lines I can orient myself and see what belongs together, else I would have serious difficulties to read the lines.

You might want to use a different KDE style to get rid of this, there are high contrast styles available for the visually impaired, but I really wouldn't want to change the lines as they are now, so definitely -1 from me.

Comment 5 Thomas Mitterfellner 2014-08-16 14:06:27 UTC

Obviously, looks are a matter of taste, but trust me: I am visually impaired and the way it is now is not helping but distracting.

But there's one more important aspect to this: lack of consistency. Can you think of any other KDE application where list views are handled like they are currently handled in amarok? I cannot. Much of the KDE experience is about consistency in the UI, and amarok is clearly inconsistent in that respect, which, IMO should be fixed.

Btw. did you have a look at krusader?

Comment 6 Myriam Schweingruber 2014-08-17 11:59:46 UTC

I checked out Krusader today, yes, that would be a viable alternative, but: we have different highlighting that is needed for selected tracks as well as the currently playing track, which adds slightly more complexity to our UI than what krusader needs, not sure how that can be worked out.

Comment 7 Tuomas Nurmi 2024-10-06 07:27:03 UTC

*** Bug 493867 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***