Dark mode doesn't persist on app closure and re-opening

[Biosias]

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What Happened?

When Dark mode is enabled and then the app is closed and reopened it opens with Dark mode disabled.
I tested that this happens on Default theme and also "Bonofix Theme" so the problem isn't only on the Default theme.

Reproduce the Bug

1. Enable Dark Mode in the settings
2. Close LogSeq
3. Open LogSeq again
4. LogSeq opens with Dark mode disabled again

Expected Behavior

When Dark mode is enabled it should persist app closure

Screenshots

No response

Desktop or Mobile Platform Information

Linux Fedora 38
KDE Desktop Wayland Session

Tested that this happens on following versions:

LogSeq 0.9.17 Flatpak version
LogSeq 0.9.17 Flatpak version

Additional Context

No response

Are you willing to submit a PR? If you know how to fix the bug.

• I'm willing to submit a PR (Thank you!)

[sprocketc]

I managed to reproduce this, so I tried to follow the trail of events to understand what's going on. The source of the problem seems to be an invalid state of preferences.json. We are storing information about custom themes in there, but we are also using local storage to persist the theme. In various cases, the theme is not properly persisted on preferences.json (installing a third theme might be required to reach this state). When we reload the app, activateUserPreferences is called and loads the prefs from the json , then selectTheme which emits theme-selected that resets the local storage theme mode (state/set-theme-mode! ) to an invalid value.

#4741 seems to be related to this functionality.

[keesse]

I have the same problem on Windows 10, but not on Linux (Mint)

[abhishekdanej]

I have the same problem

App Version: 0.9.20
Git Revision: 43c8e1c
Platform: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0 Win64 x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML like Gecko) Logseq/0.9.20 Chrome/114.0.5735.289 Electron/25.9.3 Safari/537.36
Language: en-US
Plugins:

[timothywlewis]

If I delete my $HOME/.logseq/preferences.json and then open and close Logseq it generates this:

{
   "theme": null,
   "themes": {
     "mode": "light",
     "light": null,
     "dark": null
   },
   "externals": []
 }

If I open it and then switch the from light to system to dark and then close Logseq then it saves this, and then when it reopens it is in light mode:

{
  "theme": null,
  "themes": {
    "mode": "light",
    "light": {
      "name": "Default Light Theme",
      "url": null,
      "description": "Logseq default light theme.",
      "mode": "light",
      "selected": true,
      "group-first": true,
      "group-desc": "light themes"
    },
    "dark": null
  },
  "externals": []
}

[deskoop]

I'm having exactly this issue.

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS
Release: 22.04
Codename: jammy

Anything I can do to help diagnose the problem?

[timothywlewis]

The workaround I found, at least on macOS, is to choose System Theme within Logseq, and then at the OS level to choose Dark theme.

[diegorodriguezv]

This was bug #6768 that was closed as fixed but is still present for me using Logseq App(0.10.9) on Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS.
There where other bugs related.

[cyber-shifter]

I'm still seeing this problem on Version 0.10.13 on Linux Mint. I understand the app is still in development, but this bug has been around for literal years. What's going on here? Why can't we seem to get a last resolution?

[Exanime4Ever]

@timothywlewis

Thanks to your post from April 2024 I solved this on my Linux machine with the following workaround

Switched permissions on preferences.json to 774

Manually edited to

{ "theme": null, "themes": { "mode": "dark", "light": { "name": "Default Dark Theme", "url": null, "description": "Logseq default dark theme.", "mode": "dark", "selected": true, "group-first": true, "group-desc": "dark themes" }, "dark": true }, "externals": [] }

Change now persists