Hey hey hey any updates on this <3 ?
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Absolutely no support.
There are infinitely many studio features that deserve attention before this. Trying to maintain a dark theme on a cross platform UI is an absolutely massive time sink, it’s just a never-ending torrent of little tiny problems that still make the dark theme unusable and have to be fixed. For example, if you miss changing the text color on a single bit of text somewhere in the UI, and the developer ends up needing that bit of text, they now can’t use the dark theme until you’ve fixed it, because that text is going to be unreadable black on black. Repeat that situation approximately 1000 times until you finally get every last bit of the UI touched up.
I personally prefer a dark theme if there is one, but it doesn’t really matter. Not having a dark theme isn’t what’s holding anyone back from being productive.
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I have my monitor brightness set to 13% and contrast at 39%, and have had it around these values for almost the entirety of the past decade. I have little desire for a studio dark theme.
To those complaining about their eye health: what is your brightness & contrast set to? Have you ever considered setting it to somewhere below the default? Is it too much to ask to look for solutions that are in your control first?
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Phone screens too. I have no idea why people have them set so bright. Having my phone screen at greater than 70% brightness is like staring into the sun.
I find f.lux to be rather ideal, it is a feature built-in to windows (nightlight) and android (blue light filter?) as well now and even at full brightness the lack of blue light makes it much less straining to the eyes.
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If you’re manually having to change everything and not making a color theme that changes certain elements and having it auto apply, you’re doing something wrong.
Eg: Text Color = #,#,# Window Frame Color = #,#,# Icon Pack = DarkPack
etc etc
Sure there may be more important features, but I don’t find that to be grounds to completely deny a feature, just lower its priority.
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While you are definitely correct it should be structured like that which /should/ avoid cluttering and messing around with updates, in practice there are a ton of elements which should be tagged differently (just take a small peek at any sublime text-theme file) and when any of these are even just misspelled it would take quite some effort to figure where the error is, as well as having problems if tags are not including enough (or too much) as this is often a case of user preference.
If all else fails just make it all a setting like editor colors are. Let the developers manage themes. More options that way anyway.
Trust me… it’s never that easy. Do you think that everyone thinks of every possible color theming combination when ever they pick any color anywhere in the UI? Plus the cases where one theme might have a different color for two elements which are the same color in the default theme, making it impossible for the color labeling of the “foreground text” on top of those elements to have been chosen correctly.
If you want to see an example of it gone wrong, look at dark themes on the Eclipse platform. They’re still got a lot of lingering issues after literally a decade of work going into getting them right.
You really have to build something from the ground up with having a light and dark theme in mind to get a good result.
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Well, Roblox is using Qt for the Studio UI. In fact they have a hidden feature built in where you can apply certain office themes to the UI. It’s unfinished, but it seems to be a good foundation that could be transformed into a proper dark theme.
IIRC, the main problem is that some of the old explorer icons have severe white edges and aliasing that needs to be fixed.
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Yeah afaik they said the only problem was the icons which means they probably had the majority of the dark theme done but if icons aren’t fixed no dark theme.
But that’s exactly it… that’s what it always is with dark themes, a “good foundation” / “good start”.
The hard part of making a dark theme isn’t changing the basic styling parameters, that’s deady easy. The hard part is fixing the huge mountain little things annoying things that the basic styling parameters don’t apply to, or don’t apply correctly to when they were supposed to apply.
And the worst part is the dark theme can easily be rendered totally unusable by even a single one of those little things to fix, if the developer happens to need that thing.
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I can’t wait for that “PluginGui” thing from a few release notes back. Once those are out, the output/commandline/explorer/properties can be replaced with a GUI variant we have complete control over. If roblox then adds some methods/events to detect/invoke plugin(-ish) buttons and get toolbox asset lists, we can basically create our “own” studio.
but still, a dark theme would be nice. especially since those plugin GUIs won’t change the white borders, file menu, …
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How well would it work to supply those very basic changes ‘as-is’ though, with some sort of opt-in for those who are very anxious for it rather than promising users a fully functional dark theme yet? In the spirit of ‘something is better than nothing at all’, which I think would apply in the case of Roblox studio being as bright as it is. It might be helpful that it includes those who really want to see it happen as a constant source of bug reports and other feedback as well, to speed up something that could actually be delivered to the public.
I mean, in the end even Eclipse was managable with that theme for the sole purpose of it being less bright, just not for those who care for a sleek experience quite yet.
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Just because there are more important features in progress, doesn’t mean you should completely not support something. You could go through the rest of the requests and apply the same logic and nothing would be supported. The very point of feature requests is for people to request features they think would be good, and if they find some extra time/resources on their hands, and they like the idea, they’ll try to add it in.
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Well, if it was just that there are more “important” features then I would agree.
But I go on to point out multiple other reasons why I don’t support. That I think it would take a significant amount of time to actually get it to a usable state and even when it got there it wouldn’t actually change anything: If the color of the elements in studio is bothering you enough that you can’t get your work done, I’m sure you’ll find something else that will bother you just as much once their color is changed.
I’d rather see that significant amount of time spent on features that actually do something. Minor visual improvements are fine, but not when they take a real amount of development time to do.
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My eyes supports this.
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Updated: Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub
Status: On Track.
@Spooks_HD for the dark theme tutorial: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/how-to-enable-dark-theme-in-studio/138029
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This has now been added:
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