I’m out of date on Plasma 6 changes, so apologies if this is already fixed.
The default color schemes (Breeze Classic, Breeze Light and Breeze Dark) have some options accessible by hovering over them and clicking the edit button.
To give an example: Breeze Classic by default uses the accent color on the window title bars, the option to disable it is pretty easy: Just click the edit button on Breeze Classic, go to options and uncheck the option. But for some reason, you now have to save this simple option as a new color scheme. If the color scheme is ever updated in the future, your change will be “out of sync”, because it is treated as new color scheme.
I actually wanted to ask for more options for Color Schemes (for instance, merge Dark and Light into one with an option to separate), but the current behavior makes it too weird to even discuss the idea of more options, even if would make sense for the user
This is because you’re actually modifying color scheme files, which you aren’t recommended to actually do (because they are typically owned by root, will be wiped on the next update, etc). We could make it so it’s seamless, as in Plasma will hide the fact you’re editing a copy but no one has done that yet I think We do something similiar for the menu editor already.
To be clear, I’m talking specifically about the options tab, not the colors.
This is because you’re actually modifying color scheme files, which you aren’t recommended to actually do (because they are typically owned by root, will be wiped on the next update, etc). We could make it so it’s seamless, as in Plasma will hide the fact you’re editing a copy but no one has done that yet I think We do something similiar for the menu editor already.
Window Decorations offer options with almost the same interface as color-scheme options. It is slightly confusing why simple changes (that the devs already thought would be popular) requires the creation of a new item, only for Color Schemes but not for everything else in the Appearence options.
Why? They are two distinct color schemes.
Idk, just makes sense, you have Breeze, and then you could choose whether you want it light or dark. Downloaded schemes could also be bundled with the two, and I imagine this would make it far easier to build an Android-esque Light and Dark switcher. The user wouldn’t even need to think about what color scheme it is being changed to, because it is the same, the switcher just changed the toggle under the color scheme.
Also, I do want to discuss the implementation of using dark colors for the title bar on a light scheme(cause I like Breeze Classic but it is outdated), but that discussion doesn’t make any sense right now.
I assume it’s for historical reasons, devs are humans
That’s not really anything KDE is really set up for. Color schemes is how our dark themes work, it’s just switching the colors used by applications. The only real remnant is icon themes, where we have a light/dark icon theme (but not really, Breeze should be able to recolor the icons automatically)
This might not be the best place for it, but you can take part in the Visual Design Team which discusses this kind of UX and the colors used in KDE
But it can be set up for. It is precisely because it just switches colors used by the applications that I don’t think the current way works.
The .colors file are organized by type and category, it is “”““only””“” necessary to duplicate each category and add a -dark suffix. The default would be light, and dark would be the alternative, new schemes without light would just always use the -dark suffix.
Android went through a very painful journey to implement system-wide color scheme and dark mode, but it works now, and it is a pretty nice feature. Plasma works differently, but it just means that user facing options should be condensed into a way that makes sense. If color-schemes were reworked so that each scheme is supposed to come with light and dark variants, this would open the way for Plasma to implement a simple switch between the two variants. Currently, it doesn’t work on anything other than Breeze’s Global Theme.
I meant as a user facing option and not as a default scheme. It doesn’t make sense to add an option to use dark colors for the title bar if Plasma has no way of knowing which scheme is the dark version of the current one.
I don’t work on that part of Plasma, but the dupes shouldn’t matter as it will prefer everything in ~/.local/share/applications and then /usr/share/applications. The idea being is if you need an environment variable to run an application for a user, it would be really helpful if that worked “everywhere”. I’m not sure if that .local/share prioritization is a XDG thing, it probably is.
We do something similiar for the menu editor already.