Idea: approach to palettes and themes

[Scott_Sauyet]

@Springer

This kind of thing — calculated transformations on existing colors — would be amazing.

There are plenty of tools out there in JS to lighten, darken, and blend colors. There are also plenty of color combination pickers; I’m sure we can build something useful if we choose. But it’s not so clear how much our existing themes would match something derivable this way based on a small collection of well-chosen colors. There are 135 named color keys in Vanilla!

@vilc

Taking this idea further, the “maps”/“themes” could be made easily accessible and editable, while remaining separate from the “palette base”. Captivate does all this behind the scenes, it takes the color scheme and theme as input, e.g. “blue sky” color scheme and “dark theme”, and creates a plain palette in current TW format.

This would be a useful place for TW6 to break backward compatibility, and move to such a model. Whether it’s Captivate’s three colors or four or five, or even six, it would be great to simply move in this direction. Trying to do it now in a backwardly compatible way is going to be tricky though.

[vilc]

@Scott_Sauyet

This would be a useful place for TW6 to break backward compatibility, and move to such a model. Whether it’s Captivate’s three colors or four or five, or even six, it would be great to simply move in this direction. Trying to do it now in a backwardly compatible way is going to be tricky though.

TW6 or a new theme. An idea of a new modern official theme plug in was discussed recently.

[Scott_Sauyet]

@Scott_Sauyet

I think I can iron out some of the kinks, such as the color delegation.

I was over-optimistic on this. I thought I could easily reproduce the handling of the <<colour>> macro on another palette. But I got stymied, and opened another topic to discuss it. It is seeming less and less likely that this is going to be as useful as I was hoping, though.

[Springer]

@Scott_Sauyet

There are 135 named color keys in Vanilla!

There are 88 with values actually specified (rather than being internally mapped onto other color-names), and about 58 once duplicates and redundant color words (green being green) are removed.

That’s still a high number! But the vast majority of them (in Vanilla) are shades of grey that vary quite predictably to mark differences like link-without-hover vs link-on-hover, or selected vs unselected tab background.

@Scott_Sauyet

There are plenty of tools out there in JS to lighten, darken, and blend colors.

Cool!

It would be amazing if we could leverage this power within TiddlyWiki, so that many of those minor variations could be handled by a macro like <<colour-darken primary 1>> (which might inch all hex values within <<colour primary>> toward black, by shrinking the R G and B hex-value-differences from 00 by 10% (or something like that for each of the rgb parts of the value).

If we could make a version of vanilla that specificies transformation-relations like this to track the “logic” of the vanilla template, that would be fantastic. Tweaks to just a few colors could then propagate through the whole palette. It would be worth doing an analogous thing for at least one simple dark palette as well.

[telmiger]

@Springer

@Scott_Sauyet

There are plenty of tools out there in JS to lighten, darken, and blend colors.

Cool!

One of them being ColorAction built/adapted some years ago for my own projects.

All the best,
Thomas

[Scott_Sauyet]

@telmiger

@Scott_Sauyet

There are plenty of tools out there in JS to lighten, darken, and blend colors.

One of them being ColorAction built/adapted some years ago for my own projects.

Very nice. This looks likely to be very useful!