Dark Themes
I’m excited to see interest in dark widget themes. I’ve grown to love a dark environment as I usually work on graphics or photos and dark neutral gray just makes the content come alive.
Darkilouche theme.
It has been suggested to ship some dark themes in gnome-themes in the past, but I would go a step further and propose using a dark(ish) theme by default in stock GNOME. Having a dark theme would make perfect sense for vanilla GNOME. It would expose theming issues which are easily ignored when all you run is a light background. It will not really affect huge number of end users as most distros ship their custom themes though. But the core developers will have it up their faces 
No other desktop I know is using dark widgets, it would make up for a distinct GNOME visual style to an extent the nature-theme we discussed at Guadec ever would. Let the distros be held down by conservatism, let’s be bold and go dark!
November 27th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
You’re right! Dark theme for vanilla GNOME would be great!
I hope to be at GUADEC too.
November 27th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
The combination of dark widgets and green, natural imagery would be pretty potent.
November 27th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Wow. I didn’t think any theme could make gnome-main-menu look like a bigger waste of screen real estate than it already is, but that Darkilouche theme just makes it look like a huge slab of leftover concrete.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
I always hated Dark(er) themes when I tried them, as they made white web site look abnormally bright, and also I hated the way the backgrounds in nautilus, etc. would be way too dark.
I myself also fairly recently discovered Darkilouche and it’s been my theme of choice since…it’s dark, but not too dark, and is VERY pleasing on the eyes.
I think a theme along these lines would be a great face lift for GNOME, and would make it look a lot more modern. Just my opinion though.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
definitely, wholeheartedly agree: I loved darkilouche, and now love darklooks, and would really love to get a default dark theme in gnome 2.22.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
I’d like to second the idea of exposing theming issues. One thing that really bugs me while using dark themes is dark input boxes on white/light website backgrounds. I really hadn’t thought about this issue until testing these themes out. I know it’s a web design issue but it looks very unpolished.
November 27th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
Ubuntustudio has a dark theme by default and while it’s all quite ‘exciting’ at first, it ultimately fell flat for me. Not all apps work well with it. And besides, I’m not sure about the ‘friendliness’ factor of a dark theme when it comes to what the average consumer new to linux would see first.
Saying that, personally I tend to like dark backgrounds with lighter controls like this: http://img264.imageshack.us/my.php?image=obscreenei6.png
November 27th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
[...] Vincent, Wouter, Jakub: About Dark Themes, I made my choice: [...]
November 27th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Hear Hear!
November 27th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
[...] Per questo motivo sono contento che se proprio bisogna fare una scelta venga utilizzato l’ottimo Darkilouche (e magari con colori relativi/personalizzabili) ma quando leggo che Jimmac vorrebbe qualcosa di simile alla sua creatura addirittura come tema predefinito di GNOME …beh, faccio una smorfia e penso: quanto odio ancora dovr? essere riversato solo perch?© il tema del loro desktop ?¨ troppo scuro? [...]
November 28th, 2007 at 1:15 am
Is there any way to get Darkilouche and that icon theme?
November 28th, 2007 at 1:26 am
Thanks to Emmanuele Bassi I’m now loving Darklooks as well
November 28th, 2007 at 1:35 am
Not by default, no way. I realise some people might like a light-on-dark color scheme, but making that the default would need to be backed up by evidence that such people represented a majority of users. Which certainly doesn’t include myself – if this or Darklooks were the default, changing it would literally be the first thing I did on encountering it.
November 28th, 2007 at 1:49 am
Ubuntu Studio user checking in–
I like black, blue, purple, green, and so on.
My idea is to make a theme defined by three colors that can be changed with color pickers and have things done to them for various purposes.
That is, I would choose, say, black and purple, so it would use the opposite of black for text and purple blended with white for this, dark purple for that, etc.
November 28th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Simon, like I said in the article majority of people will never see it. As fas as I know only a fraction of today’s distributions don’t make any changes to the styling of GNOME.
Infinito, the icon theme is Industrial, default openSUSE icon theme. You can grab the latest with `svn co https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/opensuse-art/trunk/icons/Industrial`. I haven’t done any releases yet. It depends on tango-icon-theme though. Industrial is essentially just folders.
Latest Darkilouche is at http://jimmac.musichall.cz/zip/Darkilouche-0.2.4.tar.bz2.
November 28th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Dark desktops to be the default GNOME look?
One day after I switched to a darker desktop Jakub Steiner writes in his blog about dark themes:
“It has been suggested to ship some dark themes in gnome-themes in the past, but I would go a step further and propose using a dark(ish) theme by default…
November 28th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Jimmac, any chance I can get the brilliant vim color scheme?
November 28th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Christian, I believe it’s this one — http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1686, but there’s been a few others, so google around
November 28th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
hello, your theme is cool, but I can’t download it from the link you just left, the link doesn’t work…
November 28th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
[...] after reading about all these dark themes, on planet gnome, ubuntu etc. I can now say i am loving this dark desktop look. i think i will stick with it for a while. what do you think? i am using the darklooks gtk engine with clearlooks window border and foxtrot icons all from the gnome-themes-extras package in the ubuntu universe repository it sooo soothing almost. [...]
November 29th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
Bello!
December 9th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
@jimmac
wrong url in your last comment….
here’s the correct one
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/zip/Darkilouche-0.2.4.tar.bz2