how to specify theme?

[aaronjanse]

Is your source up to date

• Yes
• No

What happened

Looking at theme.go, I assumed that creating a themes.json next to the existing config.json (based on the default values) would change the theme of cordless.

What did you expect to happen

I expected the theme to change

How do you reproduce this bug

cat ~/.config/cordless/theme.json << EOF
{
	"PrimitiveBackgroundColor":    "#181920",
	"ContrastBackgroundColor":     "#6272a4",
	"MoreContrastBackgroundColor": "#ff79c6",
	"BorderColor":                 "#f8f8f2",
	"BorderFocusColor":            "#8be9fd",
	"TitleColor":                  "#f8f8f2",
	"GraphicsColor":               "#f8f8f2",
	"PrimaryTextColor":            "#f8f8f2",
	"SecondaryTextColor":          "#f1fa8c",
	"TertiaryTextColor":           "#50fa7b",
	"InverseTextColor":            "#ff5555",
        "ContrastSecondaryTextColor":  "#ffb86c"
}
EOF

Error output

How to fix

System information

Key	Value
OS	NixOS
Architechture	x86

[Bios-Marcel]

I am sorry, currently the theming feature is more than a workaround. Since tview doesn't keep the actual background color, this feature was necessary at least in a minimal form to me. The plan for later is to actually make certain elements colorable, not just general stuff like "Primary Text". Anyway, currently the only way to generate a theme, is filling the struct in https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless/blob/master/tools/theme/theme.go

Just change the values and do go run main.go > config.json.

[Bios-Marcel]

For reference, this is what happens when you actually keep don't manually set background colors: rivo/tview#314

[aaronjanse]

hey, no problem!

Just change the values and do go run main.go > config.json

Will this generate a configuration that will work with an unmodified version of cordless?

[Bios-Marcel]

oh btw i meant theme.json and yes, should work either way, just drop it in your configuration folder.

[aaronjanse]

Hmmm, I got themes to work by editing theme.go, but a theme.json is not being sent to stdout (i.e. go run main.go > theme.json is writing anything to disk)

[Bios-Marcel]

oh sorry, sometimes my brain is off ... imeant to execute the theme utility not cordless main

[aaronjanse]

I ended up writing a custom func main for theme.go and encoding json from there.
Thanks @Bios-Marcel!

[Bios-Marcel]

Okay, I am sorry wasn't able to explain stuff. Just for clarity, here again:

In order to change the theme you need to edit the values in:

https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless/blob/master/tools/theme/theme.go

Go the sourcedirectory of cordless and run that file via go run tools/theme/theme.go it and pipe it into a file called theme.json. The theme.json`file then has to be moved to your config folder.

I am not sure what exactly you did. Mind to show me? I am glad that it worked anyway ^^

[aaronjanse]

I am not sure what exactly you did. Mind to show me? I am glad that it worked anyway ^^

Oh, ha. I was editing `config/theme.go`, not `tools/theme/theme.go` :P I simply edited the default theme (using `tcell.GetColor` iirc), then used `json.Marshal`. It was hacky, but it worked.

[Bios-Marcel]

lol, good job.

[indeedwatson]

Is there no way to individually change these text colors?

Show PMs seems to be the same color as the primary text, and the channel name is the same color as the primary (it says primitive but I assume it means to be primary) background. This seems like an oversight, given I can change the highlight background without being able to change the text color independent of the background.

[Bios-Marcel]

The theming hasn't been designed from the bottom up, so there's no principle to theme everything. We could technically come up with something though. Maybe something like css with component types and component ids or so 🤷‍♂️