Theme not being saved upon close/open

[justanothercell]

theme resets every time i open

[toadkarter]

Hi there, I would be happy to take a look at this one if it's still available - if the issue could be assigned to me that would be great.

[Spydr06]

sure, thanks for your interest!

[toadkarter]

@Spydr06 Just wanted to check how you wanted to approach this. Basically the way I see it, this bug is caused by two issues:

• There is currently no way to save a user config, and thus persist settings between sessions; and
• the GAction for changing the theme is currently automatically initialised on start up with "System Preferences" by default.

For each of the issues I would propose the following:

Saving

I think it should be straightforward enough to add some sort of json / yml config file with the relevant enum that the user wishes to choose for their theme.

I think you are using some form of json for the saved layouts so I think it makes sense to continue using json here? Also, just wanted to check if you had a preference as to where this config should be saved - maybe at the root of the install.

Loading

This one is a little trickier because the logic for selecting a theme is quite closely coupled with the UI code (i.e., gaction_change_theme takes in a SimpleAction parameter and is initialised with default values in the ACTIONS array).

What we can do is extract some of the logic from "gaction_change_theme" into a more generic function called "change_theme", and have "gaction_change_theme" call this - then, in the intialise method of "Application" we can call "change_theme" without having to pass in a SimpleAction, which as far as I can see is a UI specific thing.

The only question remains for me is where the UI value is initialised - because I have tried doing this locally with a hard-coded value and while the theme did change, the UI dropdown was still set to "System Preference". If you could let me know where in the code I could go to change this that would be much appreciated!

Let me know if you are happy with the above approach and I can get cracking on it!

[Spydr06]

Yes that's how I'd implement it too it too @toadkarter

• Saving: json sounds good, since we're, as you already noticed, using it for the .lrsproj and .lrsmod files. toml, which is the Rust-default for stuff like this might be a little sleeker (?), but I think json is perfectly fine.
• Loading: you have to change the default value in this line, this changes the initial button state. The ACTIONS array is in a lazy_static!{} block, so you can actually add a callback to the settings there and also load the file if not done already

[toadkarter]

Apols for the late reply - yes that all sounds good, I'm working away at it now :)

[Spydr06]

@toadkarter awesome, I'm looking forward to it. Have fun :D

[toadkarter]

@Spydr06 I've just finished up the serialization / deserialization part of this task and am moving onto saving / loading the actual theme. I just had two quick questions on this.

1. Would you recall where the initial default theme is actually being loaded in the project? I tried modifying the value in the ACTIONS array but it doesn't seem like it's having an effect.
2. Earlier you mentioned that there was a way of adding a callback to the ACTIONS array, where would this go did you mean setup_gactions?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Spydr06]

1. The standard field in ACTIONS only affects the button state, you have to change the theme itself separately. The theme is "System Preference" by default with ibadwaita.

2. Since ACTIONS is lazy_static!, this means that it is only evaluated once it's actually used at runtime. This way you can add whatever function you want to get the initial button state (that's what I meant with "callback"). But setup_gactions isn't a bad place either.

[toadkarter]

Excellent, thanks! I will give this a go now