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

[Frank Barknecht]

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.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                                     _ ______footils.org__