Themes preference pane

Questions, glitches, bugs and crashes
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sasha
Posts: 168
Joined: Wed Feb 17, 2016 4:59 pm

Themes preference pane

Post by sasha » Mon Nov 13, 2017 4:06 pm

The "Themes" preference pane looks cluttered and confusing to me.

Personally, I wouldn't need the whole Themes thing if NC's UI would - at least by default - look like Finder's. After a fresh installation of NC, I always take a screenshot of Finder and use the Themes preference pane to manually pick the colors from the screenshot. If you're using blue and grey for active and inactive selection, why not use Finder's colors by default? (Same goes for menu item names and keyboard shortcuts in general, but that's a different topic).

Some concrete ideas:

In Settings -> Theme, there are settings for "Brief mode" and "List mode". But there are 4 built-in view modes and none of them is called "Brief" or "List". This is confusing. Maybe merge "Brief mode" and "List mode" to one section with a more generic name? That would decrease items and add overview.

The amount of items is overwhelming when all items are expanded by default and scrolling through the long list doesn't give you a good overview. For example, I often change the wrong item before finding out I'm in the wrong section. Maybe display the list items collapsed by default so the user has to navigate to the correct section?

Some items appear editable, but aren't. See:
nc_themes.png
nc_themes.png (19.1 KiB) Viewed 10518 times

The table in File panels -> General is confusing. The +/- suggest you can add/remove items, but this is not really intended, right? Do you plan to extend this in the future? Otherwise, maybe just turn them into regular list items.

A quick filter option like in the "Hotkeys" pane would be nice.

And last but not least: better default themes. I would prefer a "Finder" default theme. But there are also great free light/dark themes that are created by designers. Maybe use something like Sublime Text 3's new default "Adaptive" theme?

https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articl ... tive-theme

...and keep up the excellent work!

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