#1567 Support theme plugins, choose theme in preferences

[Damien Rembert]

Probably a fair bit of work and low priority as I imagine that it's a case of "if it's not broken, don't fix it" but I think that most of the criticism I hear from other translator is that "it's too complicated/technical" and almost every time I dig a little, I feel like it boils down to "it doesn't look like the native softwares I use".
So I was wondering if we could either have settings to tweak the GUI or a few skin options that would match the default themes of Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS, and the most common desktop environments (KDE, Gnome...).

Possible options:

• rounding corners (and the radius)
• font (with size and colour)
• background, fill and outline colour
• padding
• centring, aligning left/right

[Hiroshi Miura]

I think there is another reason to feel "it's too complicated/technical", that there is so many features and menu items, and icons.
IMHO, we can take an approach to simplify menu and features. When plugin system improved and moving advanced features(MT, dictionaries, etc) as genuine plugins, we can make GUI simpler and easier to understand.

[Hiroshi Miura]

There is a related issue to adopt custom Look-and-feel, that directly change GUI.

https://sourceforge.net/p/omegat/feature-requests/1540/

Here is experimental implementation with small modification.
https://github.com/miurahr/omegat/commit/ee06aea109a0ffe29a6bdea21fcb87f980314853

[Damien Rembert]

Wow this looks great and if I understand correctly it would be fairly easy to implement different themes too.

[Hiroshi Miura]

There are very small options for theme selection in open source license.

it would be fairly easy to implement different themes too.

So answer is No. I don't implement the theme. I just use the theme(LaF) library, https://www.formdev.com/flatlaf/

If you want to implement your custom theme, it is hard like a climbing mountains, and I'd like to say good luck.

[Damien Rembert]

Sorry, that was meant to be a question, I'm afraid my coding skills don't really allow me to do such things...
Flatlaf seems to provide different themes so I hoped that once it was implemented switching from one theme to the other would be manageable.
Anyway flatlaf still looks great and that's all very exciting

[Hiroshi Miura]

Now I've start a project making OmegaT accept Theme plugin.
https://github.com/omegat-org/omegat/pull/100
and reference plugin implementation that use FlatLaf library.
https://github.com/miurahr/omegat-flatlaf

[Hiroshi Miura]

Damien, now it is about to merge the Theme plugin mechanism in OmegaT 5.6 development.

There is a skeleton template for theme developer/designer https://github.com/omegat-org/theme-skeleton

You can start from working theme code to work for new design. Why don't you challenge it as your pet project?

I've also provide a theme plugin that designs rounded.
https://github.com/miurahr/omegat-round-theme

I hope the plugin help you to promote OmegaT to your friends!

[Damien Rembert]

Oh wow, this is very impressive!
I'm trying the themes provided with 5.6 nightly and also the theme plugin you made, it all looks so nice. And even if I know it's cosmetic changes, OmegaT feels so new and fresh. I especially like "Flat Round Dark".
I will have a look at the theme-skeleton, maybe I will manage to use it.
Thank you very much for all the work you put into this!

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

The default OmegaT appearance (called a Look And Feel or LAF in Java Swing parlance) already is the most native-looking appearance that our UI framework is capable of by default. And we already do customize a lot to make things look nicer.

People's tastes in this area are so subjective that I don't see what would be reasonable other than opening up and supporting theme plugins as Hiroshi has generously implemented.

I am going to consider this RFE to be closed by Hiroshi's work. If there are additional requests please file new tickets.

[Damien Rembert]

I have tried the themes provided with the 5.6 nightly and Hiroshi's plugin and this is indeed exactly what I meant. It's beautiful and I think it looks more "accessible".
Thank you very much.

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

Implemented on master in [ce056a]. Select a theme from Preferences > Appearance.

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

Released in OmegaT 5.6.0.

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

Theme authors should see [#1580] for information about reusing OmegaT default styling.