Re: [ide-dev] Java IDEs comparison

[Aleksandar Kurtakov <akurtako@xxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Brian de Alwis" <briandealwis@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: "Discussions about the IDE" <ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Wednesday, 14 September, 2016 8:41:43 PM
> Subject: Re: [ide-dev] Java IDEs comparison
> 
> Check out bug 501406 for an example of why theming is a good thing. Unless we
> remove the ability to do any UI customization then we're going to get
> inconsistency when components are reused elsewhere.
> 
> Our CSS engine is based on Batik — which seems dead — and our binding to
> Batik is suboptimal.  And the implementation predates SWT's SWT.Skin events
> and I suspect we could get a lot of mileage switching to taking advantage of
> it.  That's a fair bit of work.

I'm not questioning the need for theming but doing it one layer above the UI toolkit doesn't work well. Please see https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.7/M2/#Platform-Dev for things added to give access to GTK CSS engine. Theming capabilities should be provided at the level where you have control over the whole drawing to get best results. If there are any Win32/Cocoa knowledgeable persons willing to work on providing a unified API at SWT level we can achieve a lot. I'm not looking over having Eclipse CSS engine with all the maintenance burden and instability coming it but I'm looking towards exposing underlying OS UI toolkit theming engine for that work.

> 
> Brian.
> 
> > On 14-Sep-2016, at 1:21 PM, Aleksandar Kurtakov <akurtako@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > wrote:
> > 
> >> 4. Ugly as sin
> >> True. Since Eclipse 4, I've always configured Eclipse to look like the
> >> classic theme. Including manually have to tinker with .e4css/ files to
> >> restore traditional style tabs. Nowadays, with Eclipse Neon, I just have
> >> the
> >> theming engine completely disabled. Good riddance.
> > 
> > I truly believe this is the path forward. We need the theming engine (or
> > smth similar at editor level only) for the sake of adjusting editor
> > highlighting colors if/when your system uses dark theme but this is not
> > implemented yet.
> > While I admire the effort spent on theming engine - putting a theming
> > engine on top of UI library designed to mimic your OS look as much as
> > possible can't give very good results.
> 
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-- 
Alexander Kurtakov
Red Hat Eclipse team