Calibre GUI styling

[Dfaure]

Hi,

Before all, I wish to thank all the Calibre developers for all their high quality work on this priceless piece of code.

Using Calibre and it's viewer regularly at night (ie. in low light conditions), I was wondering if the global GUI couldn't take advantage of (Py)Qt Stylesheets, and therefore enable "easily" to use darker themes?

Dominique

[Dfaure]

This post (and the related screenshots) would helpfully illustrate my request:

[Release] Qt dark orange stylesheet

Thanks

[kovidgoyal]

If you wish to create a dark theme for the actual text in the viewer use the viewer preferences to do so. As for GUI styling Qt will use whatever colors you have set at the system level. So switch your system theme to dark and restart calibre, and you should see dark colors.

[Dfaure]

You're right, this is the way I would have followed on a computer driven by a "real" system (no troll here), but I'm stuck on a windows 7 where I can't have any decent system theming without huge modifications in the system binaries themselves.

I was just wondering if Calibre and it's viewer couldn't fetch itself and set a custom Qt stylesheet file lying in the user preferences datas, or even if this could be done from a plugin (whereas being not so familiar with Python and Qt, I could write a plugins for this).

Regards

[kovidgoyal]

calibre will use the system colors you set in windows as well.

[Dfaure]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

calibre will use the system colors you set in windows as well.

I already toyed a bit with that, but without any heavy windows gui tweaks (which as at least one other guy I really don't want), I couldn't get a suitable configuration for both Calibre and other windows stuff.

I was just asking to have enabled in Calibre and its viewer the access point provided by Qt to customize the default look'n feel. Nothing more.

[kovidgoyal]

Feel free to run calibre from source and add the one line thats needed to load a stylesheet. Instructions are here: http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/develop.html

[Dfaure]

Here's my code source tweaks made on 0.9.20 enabling a "gui.qss" stylesheet stored in the configuration directory.

I'm posting that here as installing and using Bazaar would be a real overkill for such a small modification.

Basically, I just had to modify gui2\mainwindow.py as below:

(11)                       pyqtSignal, QObject)
(12) from calibre.utils.config import OptionParser
(13) from calibre.gui2 import error_dialog
(14) from calibre import prints
(15) 
(16) # <DFaure>
(17) import os
(18) from PyQt4.QtCore import (QFile, QString)
(19) from calibre.constants import config_dir
(20) from calibre.gui2 import info_dialog
(21) # </Dfaure>
(22) 
(23) def option_parser(usage='''\
(24) Usage: %prog [options]
(25) 
(26) Launch the Graphical User Interface

and

(104)         quit_action.setMenuRole(QAction.QuitRole)
(105)         return preferences_action, quit_action
(106) 
(107)     def __init__(self, opts, parent=None, disable_automatic_gc=False):
(108)         QMainWindow.__init__(self, parent)
(109) # <DFaure>
(110)         styleFile = os.path.join(config_dir, 'gui.qss')
(111)         if QFile.exists(styleFile):
(112)             styleSheetStr = open(styleFile, 'r').read()
(113)             self.setStyleSheet(styleSheetStr)
(114) # </DFaure>
(115)         if disable_automatic_gc:
(116)             self._gc = GarbageCollector(self, debug=False)
(117) 
(118)     def unhandled_exception(self, type, value, tb):
(119)         if type == KeyboardInterrupt:

Feel free to handle this feature better than me in the next version.

Regards