I have a visual impairment that make it really hard for me to distinguish objects where the is little contrast. This new UI trend of one pixel borders is a big annoyance for me. I constantly click the wrong window.
I actually wrote a Windows app to do something like this. It's sitting in my unfinished folder because I ran into too many issues to fix for a hobby project. The rectangle data for Windows apps seems to vary widely. I needed a bunch of different formulas to correct for the rectangles I was getting back from the WinAPI calls.
One of my features was a different border color for each app. I tried various color rules, such as multiple copies of VSCode would each get their own shade of blue, or cycle through colors of the rainbow.
Microsoft Windows is abysmal on this front - I have to use Microsoft Windows 10 periodically, while most of my life is spent in KDE, and the disjoint is jarring.
In KDE I can precisely control and set window border thickness and colour.
In Microsoft Windows 10 (and I assume 11 has continued the trend at making this even worse) I can enable a very thin border, of a themed colour, and that border disappears when the window is no longer in focus. This means a couple of terminal windows (eg gitbash) have near impossible to discern edges when they're overlapping.
On top of this, some Microsoft applications seem to break their own styling rules (Office apps, say) which I suspect is the kind of issue that stalled your project.
Yeah, I recently started to use KDE Plasma with Fedora (after Gnome left a sour taste), and the amount of customizations it allows is mind-blowing. This may be common knowledge, but as a newcomer to KDE, these very precise controls are quite a fresh breath from OSs like Win10/11 and Mac OS.
Reminded me of those Windows 98 shell customizations. Windows seems to be going backwards when it comes to customizations; there are only a few customizations allowed in Windows 11 now.
Windows 11 seems a bit better on this front than 10. I don't use either very often (mostly for gaming and sometimes at work) but I have yet to see the active window having the same color as a background one, or even be unable to tell where one window stops and the other begins.
> I have a visual impairment that make it really hard for me to distinguish objects where the is little contrast. This new UI trend of one pixel borders is a big annoyance for me. I constantly click the wrong window.
I have excellent vision and constantly struggle to figure out where GUI elements begin and end.
Like... Windows 95 has distinguishable UI elements figured out. They had clear borders, and it was easy to figure out if something was a button or input field, if it was enabled or disabled, buttons had icons and text, the use of depth was great too.
When and how did it go so wrong? It's not like there's a sudden shortage of screen space. That was a GUI that worked on a 640x480 monitor.
Windows has several high-contrast themes built-in (and in Win11 they are quite a bit more aesthetically pleasing than they used to be), you can actually even toggle between normal and high-contrast via a keyboard shortcut.
I'm glad that windows have outlines, but I'm still disappointed KDE has switched both foreground and background windows to light titlebars by default. This is something I change out of the box on both Windows 10 (dark gray accent color for title bar) and KDE (Breeze Classic color scheme).
It’s always nice to read about someone contributing to open source.
Looking at the screenshots I have a question for the KDE users here. I am surprised by the incorrect kerning and strange padding on display in the interface. Is that normal or is it a consequence of it being so customisable the author likes settings which leads to this result?
I can't speak to the kerning (it looks fine to me, I guess I'm not a font nerd) but in those screenshots, the user has selected monochrome subpixel rendering and either no or very light hinting. These together make the text a bit more blurry than it does on my own machine.
And of course, it's also possible that using a better font would improve things.
Eventually you get used to it, and start ignoring it. Sadly. I'd switched to Gnome for many years, but in the end - being able to easy tweak the desktop to my liking drove me back to KDE.
Can you please point out what that means in that sceenshot? Fonts generally got pretty good with fontconfig, but I suppose there are always some edge cases.
It’s very obvious if you look at "Documents" in the first screenshot. The spacing between D, o and c is a lot larger than between t and s.
For the padding, you can see that the spacing is strange under and over the toolbar icons. There is a lot of space between the icon in the title bar and the icon in the toolbar. Alignement between icons and texts in the file browser sidebar seems suspect to me too especially for "Pictures".
I know some people don’t care about that kind of things but I find it unsettling. Looking at it I know I wouldn’t be able to use KDE.
A common trick on css is two add two shadows. The first one is more intense, but has a very small radius. The second one has a larger radius, but a less intense colour.
This is a play on how shadows work on real life; where objects may have a strong shadow from an overhead lamp, and a softer shadow via lighting bleeding in from windows or other rooms.
The results of this are very subtle -- an untrained eye sees just "a shadow" and not two (I can only recognise this because a designer friend taught me this trick).
I wonder if applying a similar technique on window borders could work. But instead of the inner shadow being less intense, it would be a higher contrast one. It's definitely worth exploring.
Personally, I'm prefer simple borders instead of shadows. They take up just 1 or 2px (e.g.: maximise space efficiency), and are super clear.
KDE uses gpu acceleration for its ui. So that should be a negligible impact on performance. I am unsure about if you even have shadows with CPU rendering.
This is nice. One of the reasons I still stick to the "Plastik" style and haven't moved to Breeze is the "smoothness" of the interface. This seems to bring in some definition to the interface.
I know plastik feels so old and out of date. But it feels more tactile to me because of the higher gradients.
And Oxygen (the default theme), used a depressing gray. On KDE 4, I used Fusion or Cleanlooks (a port of the Clearlooks GTK theme).
KDE 5 went the other way and Breeze looks great. I sometimes try other theme but always come back to Breeze. I even used Breeze on GNOME and found it better-looking than Adwaita.
This can be accomplished on Windows11 with a custom Visual Style. Ive seen it done before on some deviantart themes. Would be cool if someone could release a stock Windows11 Visual Style with only this modified.
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I actually wrote a Windows app to do something like this. It's sitting in my unfinished folder because I ran into too many issues to fix for a hobby project. The rectangle data for Windows apps seems to vary widely. I needed a bunch of different formulas to correct for the rectangles I was getting back from the WinAPI calls.
One of my features was a different border color for each app. I tried various color rules, such as multiple copies of VSCode would each get their own shade of blue, or cycle through colors of the rainbow.
In KDE I can precisely control and set window border thickness and colour.
In Microsoft Windows 10 (and I assume 11 has continued the trend at making this even worse) I can enable a very thin border, of a themed colour, and that border disappears when the window is no longer in focus. This means a couple of terminal windows (eg gitbash) have near impossible to discern edges when they're overlapping.
On top of this, some Microsoft applications seem to break their own styling rules (Office apps, say) which I suspect is the kind of issue that stalled your project.
Reminded me of those Windows 98 shell customizations. Windows seems to be going backwards when it comes to customizations; there are only a few customizations allowed in Windows 11 now.
What I do not comprehend is the logic behind why Windows does not support such in my view easy to implement choices.
I have excellent vision and constantly struggle to figure out where GUI elements begin and end.
Like... Windows 95 has distinguishable UI elements figured out. They had clear borders, and it was easy to figure out if something was a button or input field, if it was enabled or disabled, buttons had icons and text, the use of depth was great too.
When and how did it go so wrong? It's not like there's a sudden shortage of screen space. That was a GUI that worked on a 640x480 monitor.
Looking at the screenshots I have a question for the KDE users here. I am surprised by the incorrect kerning and strange padding on display in the interface. Is that normal or is it a consequence of it being so customisable the author likes settings which leads to this result?
And of course, it's also possible that using a better font would improve things.
Eventually you get used to it, and start ignoring it. Sadly. I'd switched to Gnome for many years, but in the end - being able to easy tweak the desktop to my liking drove me back to KDE.
https://i.imgur.com/zCDzqAe.png (2× resolution screenshot as it's from a high-DPI screen)
For the padding, you can see that the spacing is strange under and over the toolbar icons. There is a lot of space between the icon in the title bar and the icon in the toolbar. Alignement between icons and texts in the file browser sidebar seems suspect to me too especially for "Pictures".
I know some people don’t care about that kind of things but I find it unsettling. Looking at it I know I wouldn’t be able to use KDE.
This is a play on how shadows work on real life; where objects may have a strong shadow from an overhead lamp, and a softer shadow via lighting bleeding in from windows or other rooms.
The results of this are very subtle -- an untrained eye sees just "a shadow" and not two (I can only recognise this because a designer friend taught me this trick).
I wonder if applying a similar technique on window borders could work. But instead of the inner shadow being less intense, it would be a higher contrast one. It's definitely worth exploring.
Personally, I'm prefer simple borders instead of shadows. They take up just 1 or 2px (e.g.: maximise space efficiency), and are super clear.
> Something cheeky happens! I actually draw the shadows with 0% alpha channel!
Does that still pay the performance cost to "draw" them, or does it get optimized away?
How does one use it?
Is it a script I can put somewhere on my laptop and then the borders will have outlines?
I use Debian Stable.
I think Plasma has something like "Decorations" - can a custom decoration be used? Can one use scripts in the "Decorations"?
I know plastik feels so old and out of date. But it feels more tactile to me because of the higher gradients.
Then KDE4 got lost in an ugly, buggy mess of transparency.
KDE 5 went the other way and Breeze looks great. I sometimes try other theme but always come back to Breeze. I even used Breeze on GNOME and found it better-looking than Adwaita.