I’ve got an idea. Since really digging into Scrivener and making it my main writing tool, I’ve played around a lot with backgrounds, textures, color palettes, etcetera, in an attempt to design for myself an aesthetically-pleasing writing environment. However, that has entailed me hunting high and low on the Internets looking for textures, images, etc., and painstakingly adjusting colors in the UI so that everything “matches” (I’m a bit OCD when it comes to interfaces and color and things).
So, I figured, why not ship the next version of Scrivener with a set of pre-built, pre-tweaked visual “themes,” with different paper textures and writing backdrops, pre-selected color palettes in the UI, etcetera? These would obviously not be all things to all people, nor would they satisfy every visual aesthetic, and could obviously be tweaked, with the results being saved as a user “preset.” I know you can already do this via Preferences (loading, saving, themes), but having some pre-built themes might serve a good starting point for folks who want to try out a different “look and feel” for their writing apparatus but don’t quite know where to begin, and might serve as a good place to get started for those who’ve never done a lot of in-depth customization before.
Yeah, that’s already something we want to do. You kind of answered your own question as to why there aren’t any right now: it takes a lot of work and time to make these!
I just grabbed the colors from Solarized and created my own color palette (OSX). It appears I could have just downloaded his palette and install it manually. I ran into problems, and it only took a few minutes to assign the colors manually.
Once I created the color palette, then assigning them was fairly straight forward. Maybe took 10 minutes?
Yes a theme is something that can be shared if they desire to. The “Manage” button in the preferences pane has an option to “Save Theme Preferences” to a file, which can then be uploaded here for others to use.
I second the vote (for Merovech to share, please???)… I’ve tried (and partially succeeded) in getting Solarized “installed”, but I still have things that don’t work well. Seeing somebody else’s take would be great.
I think you could just save the settings to a file and upload that, although I don’t know how to get just colors and nothing else…
I’m not sure, it works fine for me. I would press Cmd-I on the file in Finder and in the “Name & Extension” section, ensure it does actually end in “.stheme”. Finder’s default settings hide the file extension and that could be making a mess of things.
The best way to remove path extensions from files is to load Get Info on the file in the Finder (Cmd-I) and remove the extension in the “Name & Extension” area. If you just remove the extension in the main Finder window, sometimes Finder just changes the extension to being hidden rather than actually removing it. Not sure why.
Brilliant, wonderful, very nice color theme, etc…
Now, just when I thought I was getting some sort of a handle on scrivener, how do I revert to factory settings for the color theme?
