[PD] changing the look of Pd to be more readable

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Nov 4, 2007, at 6:03 AM, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> Hallo,
> Chris McCormick hat gesagt: // Chris McCormick wrote:
>
>> Almost all visual improvements are going to be subjective. That is to
>> say, for every suggestion someone makes along the lines of visual
>> changes to Pd, there will be many people for the change and many  
>> people
>> against. For that reason, please put in the time to make all changes
>> configurable, so that those who like the current look of Pd can  
>> easily
>> put in command line flags or .pdrc settings to make it looks the  
>> way it
>> does now. Ideally this would be something like "-originalgui". As for
>> the default look, that could be decided by majority vote I guess.
>
> I very much support that approach. What looks good or is helpful is a
> very personal decision. We already had a heated discussion about which
> fonts to choose and I'd rather not repeat this for every other aspect
> of Pd, this would be counter-productive and bind too many resources
> better wasted elsewhere. ;)
>
> The only way a GUI overhaul can work in the long run IMO is to make a
> configuration system. This actually probably should not be a command
> line flag like "-originalgui" or "-newgui", but a new configuration
> file for themes that can be loaded with "-theme" or so. This is the
> approach that works for most other applications as well (Firefox, Gtk,
> etc.) All that Pd would need to supply is some hooks for setting
> various things like colors for canvas-BG, thickness of
> signal/msg-cords, (or even fonts, though this may be tricky) etc. Then
> the config file would just list the values for these variables, maybe
> in simple Tcl-syntax (no XML!). But please don't enforce huge GUI
> choices on all users.

I'll add -vanillagui to set the old colors.  Plus I am working on a  
hack so you'll be able to set those colors from within Pd.

Pd is sorely in need of a good preferences API, then this could  
easily be added to that... any volunteers? :D

.hc

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