adding "pick screen color" to predferences chessboard

[Idzme]

Woudl be more easy to change the color of the board or arrows with this function. So you can just pint you cursor on a point on the screen (eg, dark square chess.com theme) and you have that color.

[whelanh]

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Currently the only arrow you can pick a color for is the "last move" arrow and it already has a color picker (when you press the "Color" button).

In terms of the appearance of the GUI, the color choices are typically related to each other for a wide variety of elements that are displayed. You can see what's involved by looking at one of the themes in the tcl/themes directory.

[Idzme]

what I mean is when you want to change the color of the light or dark squares and you wnat to match them with a chess.com board/theme. Now you have to check the RGB numbers. With the function "pick screen color"you get a crosshair that you can click somewhere in your screen and that color is then automaticcaly used as color in scid. Absolutely no "must have" But I used it in lucas chess and liked it, wothout It I will survive :-)

[whelanh]

@Idzme -- Once I understood what you were getting at, I like the idea! It wasn't easy to get it to work for Windows but it's now implemented in v5.1.4.25. I've tested it on my Windows virtual machine and it worked -- hopefully it will work on your real machine!

There are 4 new buttons shown below that are the "color picker" buttons.

Once you press it, scidCommunity disappears and waits for you to click somewhere on the screen on the color you want. Then scidCommunity reappears.

[Idzme]

thanks, just did some testing and it does not work with a second screen. So left monitor the chess.com tehem and right screen SCID. But when I put the chess.com browsee screen on the same monitor it does work, but colors are not matching at all. see screenshot

I tried to match the light squares, but he no worries , absolutely no problem if its not there.
gr Bas

[whelanh]

That's too bad. I think this is the problem I have trying to fix Windows issues when I only have a Windows virtual machine, not an actual Windows computer. It works really well on Linux (I matched chess.com's "bot" board). I will see if I can think of anything else, but I may be stuck on trying to provide this feature for Windows.

[whelanh]

@Idzme -- when you have time, could you try again with v5.1.4.26? The issue you are having might have something to do with the scaling of your monitor (i.e., it's not at 100%). The newest version tries to sense what your DPI scaling is.

[Idzme]

I will download the new version and try, thanks!!

edit: yes, now it works fine! thanks!

[stevenaaus]

Hmm - doesn't work for me. ubuntu 22.04 /X11/Kde.
Click on PickColour, whole screen goes blank with a cursor until i click the mouse, then screen returns, but still locked until i click again, when (it seems) white is selected. . I had a look at the code...it's pretty crazy, ambitious.

[whelanh]

@stevenaaus -- Thank you very much for reporting on the failure. I agree that it may be overly ambitious given that "color picker" technology varies widely across operating systems and hardware setups (e.g., dual monitor). It seems to me the likely culprit in your case is X11, but I will investigate it as well as KDE...I am on an Arch/hyprland setup which doesn't help ;-)

I was initially sceptical about this feature, but I do like it where it works.

[whelanh]

I issued a new release v5.1.4.27 that I hope fixes the bug you reported, but I can't test because my machine does not match yours.

[stevenaaus]

Haha - it works. Good stuff.
But It'd be a better solution to incorporate this feature into a custom selectColor widget to replace the shitty unix ::tk_chooseColor.
I personally use ::SelectColor from BWidget, but it requires installing the whole of Bwidget, which is pretty huge. Maybe AI can create an isolated , modified ::SelectColor for this purpose. It's been a while since i messed with this though.

    proc tk_chooseColor {args} {
      if {[set i [lsearch -exact $args -initialcolor]] > -1} {
        set args [lreplace $args $i $i -color]
      }
      set result [eval ::SelectColor::dialog .bwidget $args]
      set ::bwidgetBackgrounds $::SelectColor::_userColors
      return $result
    }

[whelanh]

Thank you very much for mentioning BWidget. I was not aware of this library and it explains why the dialog windows in Scid vs PC look so much better! 😊 I will look into it. I think some of my other dialog windows (like the Lichess and chess.com download ones) could also be improved with Bwidget. To state what is hopefully obvious, I admire and appreciate what you have done with Scid vs PC.