I just went through a really painful experience when I adopted a dark 
theme.  The existing ones that are in leoSettings were unusable, because 
too many of the syntax colors were unreadable against the dark background.  
I've gotten it working more or less to my satisfaction (there's one color 
that's still too dark, but it's too painful for me to find and change).

I spend many hours trying to figure it out and track down the colors and 
what they affected.  For every change, I had to restart Leo because 
reloading the styles and settings didn't seem to do a complete job.

My main problems were these:

1. I couldn't always tell what color on the display corresponded to which 
color name.  For example, what syntax color is used for triple-quoted 
text?  And is there a difference between triple quoted with double or 
single quotation marks?

2. I had trouble threading through from @color-name to the color 
specification, because they wren't linked in some easy-to-find way.

3.  I found it hard to know which settings affected the display pane colors 
and which affected the syntax coloring colors.

It's possible that I might get very familiar with these things and get more 
efficient at it.  But most of us will only do this once or twice ever, so 
even if we get good at it, we'll forget how before we do it again.  I think 
this might be something that people like Ed don't appreciate enough:  most 
of us aren't familiar with the details of this machinery, and it doesn't 
seem to be explained well anywhere findable when we want it.

Contrast this with my experience in going through the same process - 
tweaking a dark theme - with PyScripter.  It was still painful, but there 
is a good color picker, a dialog with symbolic color roles and names, and 
the colors take effect right away.  There is still have some ambiguity 
between a theme and specific syntax colors, but it was way easier and far 
less painful than with Leo.

On Tuesday, March 6, 2018 at 9:27:16 AM UTC-5, Terry Brown wrote:
>
> On Tue, 6 Mar 2018 07:58:33 -0600 
> "Edward K. Ream" <[email protected] <javascript:>> wrote: 
>
> > ​status_bg_color.  I don't remember exactly.  But the name, whatever 
> > it is, tells us exactly *nothing* about what the actual color is, and 
> > that, and only that, is what is important in the css. 
>
> I think what matters is the color's role, not the actual color itself. 
> Themes are usually built from a relatively small palette of carefully 
> picked colors that play well with each other.  Each color has a 
> specific role withing that palette.  solarized makes the set seem bigger 
> than usual because it's really two palettes, one dark and one light, 
> combined. 
>
> It's better to define the css in terms of semantic names like error_fg 
> and info_fg than to have to remember you're using solarized-red (or 
> was it solarized-magenta) for errors and solarized-yellow (or was it 
> solarized-green) for info. items. 
>
>
>

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