Feedback Dark Theme should be Free?

I was hoping that Unity will allow Dark Theme for personal Users as well.Since the Unity annual survey asked this question.If not in 2019.3 then when?Dark theme is a lot better than light theme and It will be a great addition to Unity Personal.I would also like to see a custom Theme / Interface options as in Blender!

 

Most probably never.

 

For the meantime, there is this 80% dark theme
https://forum.unity.com/threads/editor-skinning-thread.711059/

 

Nobody will ever make me read light letters again on a dark background, as it was in the 80s of the last century.
And these new "Dark Ages", with this fashion on a "Dark Theme" in all designers applications around - someday they will end...
Anyway...

 

I have a theory that they will. I'll quote myself in another thread

 

You don't have to use the dark theme lol. Even if free tier users will get a dark theme you'll probably still be able to choose between light and dark the same as you can in paid subscriptions.

Also I find it hard to agree with you that dark themes are a fashion. Maybe in the future light themes will return to being the default in professional applications, but there are still a lot of people who prefer dark themes so it probably won't go away.

 

-> definition of fashion

 

There's one powerful guy at Unity blocking it from happening. Luckily the new skinning might be enough to let anyone switch to it.

It would remove a lot of pain from the Unity dev's themselves, because currently they have to make a dark/light version of everything they do. For example, some of their DOTS stuff is partially broken in light because you can't see the values.

 

Is it fashion? Or is it rather comfort of work for eyes?

 

They will still have to support both light and dark themes. Dark for fashion and light for actual work (it's better for the eyes on the long run). Unless they want to lose real people, who actually using their software.

I won't go into details again, because we debated it countless times. Dark theme is for show. Light theme is good for the eyes. If the "light" is hurting someone's eyes, it is 99.9% that the room is under-lit so it's needed to change, not the theme of the software.
I mean if we're talking about real solutions and not about fashion.

 

I have a feeling that this isn't how majority of the users see this..

It has very little to do with fashion, it really is just easier on the eyes. I have my monitors near 0 for brightness and contrast + always work with background lighting (never ever in dark room). I've worked with computer screens for several decades and my eyes truly hurt if I have to stare at bright screen all day long. I even run dark theme mods for most websites, including this forum.

Sure you can deal with the light theme but it's uncomfortable. Every single tool I use in production uses dark theme, even text editor.

 

How can I do this?

 

Usually with a browser extension. For example this one.

 

Thanks!

 

Come on Unity? 10 bucks a month package (maybe include cloud) 100 a year.
Easy money. Not like there isn't a free workaround

 

Quite frankly, I'd rather them to offer a dark theme for the forums, the editor default theme is not that bright and you can still lower your screen brightness.

2019.2.3f1:

​

2019.30b1:

​

 

Courtesy of this thread: https://forum.unity.com/threads/editor-skinning-thread.711059/#post-4785434

 

My monitors are at 20% brightness and I still don't like how bright most things end up being.

As for the forum, I use this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/14652163/
As well as this, which lets me make custom edits to sites CSS and save it such as below, the lower one is stock width vs the top modified width. Much better for viewing peoples code snippets pasted into threads: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/

 

Hmm, complaining about brightness, yet making bright game ....
You probably introduce too much contrast.

The default UI colors design indeed is not that bright. Is not white either, but is more neutral.

Potential problem with dark UI designs become apparent, in bright environments, where reflections may introduce much of eye strain.
All fine, if there is no strong sunlight, or other bright source of light and white walls directly behind.

Mind I use myself dark color scheme on VS.

 

That is a Synty demo scene from the prototype pack that happen to be about the right size to use for testing that I wanted to do. At the time of that screenshot I was in process of trying to figure out why my conversion from 2019.2 to 2019.3 was causing my entities mesh to have problems so I was reimporting, changing, removing, and disabling different things which included postprocessing which meant no more exposure adjustment and things of that nature in an attempt to narrow down the cause. With aforementioned adjustments to my monitor brightness, postprocessing exposure adjustment, and the inclusion of a dark color scheme to Unity, it makes everything a comfortable level.

The intent of my posts were to share that obtaining a dark theme in 2019.3 is doable and that the forums theme can be fairly easily adjusted. I don't know what you intended to accomplish with your initial remark but it certaintly didn't contribute anything positive to the conversation. As for contrast, I am in no way an artist, I don't know what constitutes a "good" contrast. I have mild/severe protanomaly, I simply liked the fact that in that particular scene I was more easily able to distinguish the colors present.

 

I am fine with either, as long as it didn't get in the way of the actual UX. For example, spot the 2nd timeline marker and extrapolation mark :

Spoiler: Answer

Or yellow on light theme



(These are perfectly visible on dark. I did report these kind of "bugs" but it turns out to be a low priority defects)

I found that light theme has its pros too. For apps like music composing software or digital painting, I don't know why but light theme give me more productivity/keeping me alert. I feel sleepy and mind bogged on dark theme when it comes to less logic/more creative work.

 

The 2nd one you posted, the one on the right. I see you circled something, so I imagine it is there, but I even opened it in a new tab and zoomed in and I don't even see anything in the circle. That is quite useless, lol.

 

The 2019.3 GUI is a defect in itself... the dark theme for it makes it it only slightly less awful.

 

The light theme is an accessibility issue in my opinion, so using a hex editor to change a byte to get the dark theme if you have eye or other vision issues is ok in my book. Unity should provide both light and dark theme for the free version out of the box, as is basically an industry standard for most web sites and apps these days, paid or not. The accessibility issue is very much a legal issue more than an ethical one.

 

This explains the real reason 2019.3 was delayed until January. Dark theme will be made free with the release of 2019.3 but the price for Plus/Pro subscriptions increased at the beginning of the year, so Unity had to delay the release until after people already paid the higher prices!

 

The truth is out

 

That's Amazing

 

Here is the dark theme. https://github.com/Gluschenko/UnityDarkSkin

 

Very suspicious, if exe requires administrator privileges to run.

 

It changes hex values of Unity!

 

You can read all the code, it's right there. Don't use it if you're not comfortable.

 

I looked now inside, out of curiosity. Looks clean.
However, I wasn't planning using it anyway.

 

Actually, they almost confirmed the dark theme for free on Twitter, when I asked
https://twitter.com/unity3d/status/1184899104473866242?s=20

 

So you want to believe, which is exactly where they want you to be.

 

Finally!

 

just my 2p's worth but why does an app force a theme of its own, while i cant speak for mac, linux and windows have generic colour scemes that surely it would make sense if a user wants lime green borders and red backgrounds or whateve floats their boats that conforming with the colour scheme by default would be sensible

 

It's a bit different when making an application that is using a UI library that is created for an OS (WPF for Windows, GTK, etc for Linux). This is just an educated guess, but I would imagine that especially now since Unity is using UI Elements, all of the visuals are tied to that framework, otherwise, it would all have to be tied to an OS native library for each OS or something to that effect.

 

Yes and no, any app can get the list of colours from an OS and decide to use them or not..

 

It's not about fashion, it's about style

 

Most problem related to color theme is that there are 2 color themes for editor, and you must support it when you create editor extensions. Even Unity's official packages usually has color theme related issue (some UI is hard to recognize in light/dark theme and vice versa). And Unity doesn't provide unified API for getting color values for current theme, like GetCurrentForegroundFontColor(). This is extremely annoying.

 

With the new UI framework Unity is moving to (UI Elements) this isn't an issue anymore. You just make your Ui and it works with both themes. The editor (2019.3 forward) is built with this framework and there are docs and tools (UI Builder) available to help build UI with it. Guess they haven't done much to push this yet, and It does have an IMGUI container to run that UI with the current editor. Going forward this will be the recommended way to make editor tools UI and soon in-game UI.

 

colorForMyThing = EditorGUIUtility.isProSkin ? 0.25f : 0.75f;

 

More like

Code (CSharp):

1. colorForMyThing = EditorGUIUtility.isProSkin ? 0.25f : 0.99f;

Amirite?

 

Spoiler: Actually it feels more like...

if (EditorGUIUtility.isProSkin)
{
colorForMyThing = 0.25f;
}
else
{
colorForMyThing = ;
}

 

It didn't happen!

 

Hex editor. Your eyes will thank you.

 

Everyone is aware of that, the point is not having to do that.

 

Unity 2019.3+ light theme is pure eye corona! Get it ok it's not funny.

Frankly I think Unity should be giving users a physical health warning about long usage of light theme (ie I wouldn't want to look at it for more than 5mins its eye torture)

..The pre 2019.3 the light theme was actually somewhat decently styled, not overtly white, actually used gradients, buttons weren't bland, group panels all separated by distinguished borders etc it just wasn't so fffkng flat.... for all the pre 2019.3 gui issues that could have been improved they just took it in a direction that made it all even worse. The behind subscription pay wall dark theme is now the only usable gui for Unity was that by design?

 

Even with 3 ceiling lights the light theme hurts my eyes. You've probably just never suffered chronic eye strain before. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I don't use darker themes in apps for coolness I use them so they don't burn my eyes during prolonged usage. I do agree 100% white on 100% black is a bad idea, but that's why themes have to be tweaked to get the contrast right.

 

People can think that using a dark theme is for "fashion" all they want. I typically keep my monitors at 10% brightness and use soft light bulbs, and even got a Samsung phone specifically because the browser automatically inverts light-colored websites to dark backgrounds.

I very much wanted to use the beta of Cascadeur, but even trying to put my monitors at their lowest setting, I can't stand looking at it for more than 5 minutes. It gets tiresome having to try and create custom themes for things myself when they don't exist.