Is it possible to change the color the little arrows to the left of the items in the Binder?

[Lunatique]

When using any of the darker themes, the little arrows to the left of each item in the Binder becomes very hard to see, since those arrows’ color don’t change to accommodate the darker background colors. But there doesn’t seem to be any options to change the arrows’ color? Is that possible? If so, how?

[devinganger]

This is a known issue with the current release of Scrivener for Windows and is on the list of bugs to fix. Per L&L policy, we do not have an ETA on when we will see this fix.

[Lunatique]

Thanks! Another thing on the list of things I wish Scrivener will fix.

[Sigil]

I ran into this with the dark themes. It seems like a lot of the colors are baked into the theme file and aren’t tied to the options menu at all. I thought I might try digging into the .SCRTHEME file, via a text editor but it’s all symbols and nonsense.

I’d love to see a more comprehensive support for theme color editing.

[AntoniDol]

We solved this recently:

Increase contrast of binder arrows

Here you go… A new and updated version. Here is an updated and corrected version of SolarizedDark (again): This one has white arrows in TreeView controls like the Binder, Outliner and Keyboard Settings. [SolarizedDarkWhiteBinderArrows] Do read the Readme.txt file for the place to store the custom icons that come with this Theme. Use Window > Themes > Import Theme… to place the Theme in the Themes folder and on the Custom Themes menu. Alternatively, use Window > Themes > Load Theme from …

How to edit the Theme is mentioned in this post:

Inspector - is it possible to add a "notes 2"?

Hints: Window > Themes > Save to file… (except for the Default Theme , Use White instead) Unzip the .scrtheme file with 7-zip (don’t bother to change the extention to .zip) You’ll find four files: *.pal, *.prefs, *.xml and… *.qss. QSS is a variant of CSS, add your code to it with a text editor (I use MS Code) Zip the four files with 7-zip and rename to .scrtheme Window > Themes > Load from file…

[AntoniDol]

@Sigil

I’d love to see a more comprehensive support for theme color editing.

A GUI for updating colors in the .PAL file and a visual representation of the classes in the QSS file would indeed be very interesting. Building a Scrivener Theme Editor is not an easy task to undertake.

The Qt Creator IDE would be the ‘native’ environment to create such a GUI tool for editing the .PAL file, but the would mean installing the Qt6 development environment, which seems a bit overdone for the task of changing the color values in the .PAL file.

Fortunately, all four files in the .scrtheme zipfile are simple textfiles. You can edit them in any text editor, but using MS Code helps you with code coloring and intellisense.

If anyone wants to build a Scrivener Theme Editor, I’ll be happy to join in as the UX/UI designer…

[Sigil]

It worked! 7-zip was definitely the key I needed to unlock this. I unzipped both my theme and the example theme, find the altered code for swapping the image files in the .qss file, copied those into mine.

I had a bit of trouble getting it to import afterwards but I figured out that for some reason the files were smaller than they should have been after decompressing. I worked around this by dropping the .qss into my theme while it had the .7z extension, then renaming after.

Thank you for your help!

[AntoniDol]

Glad I could help. I always use the Zip format from the context menu after selecting the four files, then rename to scrtheme.

Actually, I have an AutoHotKey-script for Reloading a Theme after changes in MS Code, which is way faster. But that’s for when you create your own Themes…