Use gradience for themes, instead of options in installer:

[Blisterexe]

as the title says, instead of using the current theme system, this should be themed thanks to a gradience plugin, like the firefox gnome theme.

this would allow users to have any color scheme they would want, and the developers wouldnt have to spend time making new themes.

[Foldex]

There's no reason for us specifically to use Gradience, as they already have a plugin system designed to integrate with other projects (which they use for firefox-gnome-theme).

This has been a long standing request for them already, there just hasn't been much activity on it.
GradienceTeam/Plugins#1
It would have to operate a bit differently from existing plugins though, as we have to patch steam directories that can get reset on update, while the steam loopback host requires files to be in those directories in order to load.

For what it's worth, we do have the ability for users to supply Custom CSS to make their own themes, it's just not pretty or unified with the system like a Gradience plugin would be.

As for saving us time, don't think that it does much there.
Most of the time is spent on maintaining the theme and preventing breakages due to Valve changing the Steam client, not supporting themes.

[Blisterexe]

can you clarify what you mean by "as they already have a plugin system designed to integrate with other projects", does that mean they would have to implement it, and not you or tkashkin, or am i misunderstanding?

[Foldex]

can you clarify

Gradience has a plugin repo, in order for Gradience to support this it needs a plugin. The plugins are rather simple, technically anyone could implement one, but as it is their plugin system I'd lean on the ball is in their court.

As I see it there are some considerations that need addressing for a Gradience plugin:

• We need to patch Steam files under steamui in order to apply changes, and need to keep repatching whenever a Steam update resets those files.
• If this were a fire and forget situation, it'd be really simple to have a Gradience plugin generate a custom css file and plop it into steamui. We could import that pretty easily, except:
• That directory can be reset by steam updates, and Steam will not load CSS from outside of that directory, so no symlink or @importing a file outside that dir would work.
• Every time the directory resets, users would need to reinstall with both Gradience and our installer script, which would be annoying.
• Gradience could potentially call our installer script from their plugin to solve that, but then needs to support the various installer options etc etc.
• Alternatively, we could have an agreed upon location that Gradience can write to, and the installer would support pulling from during an install.
• So long as the Gradience CSS stays the same, this requires only one execution of the installer. But if you wanted to change your Gradience colortheme, you might run into the same "double install" issue.

Basically, its possible but patching Steam is a pain that doesn't play that nicely with others.

[Blisterexe]

Hey, so obviously i am no developer, but i think that adding an extra theme called "Gradience" whose file would be edited by a gradience plugin would be a good way to do it, as the current themes seem to be controlled by a single css file. But that's just my opinion, thank you for taking the time to explain!

[eylles]

for anyone interested, i cobbled a template to build a custom css with pywal16

/* ------------------ */
/* --- Custom CSS --- */
/* ------------------ */

/* --- EXAMPLE: Override Theme Colors --- */
:root
{{
	--bg: {color0};
	--fg: {color15};

	--headerbar_bg: {color0};
	--popover_bg: {color0};
	--view_bg: #{color0.lighten(1%)};

	--accent: {color12};
	--accent_bg: {color2};
	--accent_disabled: {color12}80;
	--accent_hover_bg: {color12}12;
	--accent_active_bg: {color12}29;
	--focusring: {color12}80;

	--destructive: {color11};
	--destructive_bg: {color3};
	--destructive_disabled: {color11}80;
	--destructive_hover_bg: {color11}12;
	--destructive_active_bg: {color11}29;

	--success: {color13};
	--success_bg: {color5};
	--success_fg: var(--fg);

	--warning: {color14};
	--warning_bg: {color6};
	--warning_fg: var(--fg);

	--error: {color11};
	--error_bg: {color3};
	--error_fg: var(--fg);
}}

later i will figure out a script to directly read and assign the values form any .json used by gradience, tho idk how to make gradience plugins so once i got that they will have to explain how to convert it to a proper plugin

[eylles]

well, i can now announce that there is a python script to create themes from gradience, it may need adjustment.

https://github.com/eylles/steam-adwaita-gradience