Colorize backgrounds to spot forms (related dialogs) on busy screen

Hi all,

I often have several if not many forms open on my screen at once. They all look basically the same, until you read the tiny non-bold or light gray form title. Sometimes this title is covered, and always it’s hard to read until I point my glasses (think nose) directly at it. Boy it was nice to just glance around with my eyeballs years ago.

Is there a way to color the backgrounds of the forms? Or maybe the form border? Then it would be possible to spot a form when only the bottom left corner was peeking out.

Thanks,

Carey

GrampsAIO64-5.1.3-2 on Windows 10

If a feature you like, dont exist, you can make a suggestion on this site:

https://gramps-project.org/bugs/

Some might or might not agree that its a good feature and maybe someone decide to try to make it reality (or might not)

(I do not personally know if this is possible or not at the moment)

Thanks! I’ll submit it over there. I didn’t know if it was already possible and I just never found it, or if it needs coded.

I suspect that this is not an option supported by the GTK libraries. (Which is an absolute prerequisite for GUI options implemented for Gramps.)

Also, even if you were able to interest a developer in such a feature, I strongly recommend working out a color scheme or interface to recommend before submitting a request. Color aesthetics are not a traditional strong suit of programmers.

see:

Something that might help you is to play around with the Themes addon settings. I have never found another overall theme better than Adwaita but changing the font and size may help.

If you want to explore changing the actual theme look you can download and add themes to those that are already available. The themes will often be in tar.gz compressed files so you may also need the program to extract the theme’s folder. The good news, you do not have to relaunch Gramps to update the Theme list; just relaunch the Preferences window.

Wouldn’t Themes affect ALL the GUI colors for each gadget type, not allow different floating Gramps windows to have different colors even though they are of the same type?

True. But a different theme might just offer something different. Something to explore. I spent a good portion of a day downloading and trying out different themes. The major drawback was too few of them had good delineation of Tabs.

A different font and size will probably be the most help because these changes also affect the Title bar font. And if eyesight is a growing problem this should help.

I had forgotten when 1st working on George & Serge’s Citations Tab enhancement that I had done some Themes add-on tweaks for old eyes. (Boosted the font point size from 10 to 16.) So my observational tests for the column widths were flawed when targeting for a standard 800x600 window.

But that suggests that maybe a scaling factor (the ratio corresponding to “current font size” divided by “default font size”) for column widths, heights & so forth might be a future feature.)

Spending most of my career coding, I resemble that remark! I just don’t have the gumption or maybe the cpu cycles to learn a new dev system at 67. I’ve moved on to making music.

I would propose a configurable scheme like the colors of tags. Maybe change all the text on a form type if the background isn’t an option.

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Thanks Dave, I’ll give that a look.

Woohoo! That will be a big help, if nothing else but the dark mode. I’m working on a 32 in 4k monitor as well as a 4k notebook display, and fonts are tiny and all the white is bright. I’m going to play around with this some.

Thanks for forcing me to confront the subject off addons. There’s just so much to learn about Gramps and I have a lot to do in the genealogy world too, so I only learn what I need to learn. Themes is a must have!

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The Data Entry gramplet, Web Connect Pack and Plugin Manager Enhanced are ‘must have’ add-ons too.

(Formerly Deep Connections was one of my ‘must have’ add-ons. But it has recently become less useful… as it now reports Note links with the same importance as immediate family and repeats the same Deep Connection through each sibling recursively.)

Thanks Brian, I’ll check them out fer sher.

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