After a decade of 2-factor authentications(plug in your phone and wait 3 mins), I finally gave up and installed my first ever mail client, KMail. The setup was great! I remember fixing stuff for family, back when dinosaurs was in fashion, and messing with servers and routing. This was literally just “click button, watch magic”. Great stuff, love everything about it!
But I’m having some issued with reading the text. I’m guessing it’s some kind of soft conflict with my theme “Breath Dark”. I had the same kind of issues with Firefox and Dark Reader, where I manually had to set up sliders to be able to read some text fields, on individual websites.
Is this just the cost of darker themes? Manually poking around with sliders to fix stuff? Or, more likely, am I doing something horribly wrong?
I use KDE Plasma 6 and a dark theme, although not KMail. I have never had the experience you describe. In fact, I’ve never even seen the controls you mentioned.
So, it seems to me, you have an themeing problem there. Although I don’t use it, I do have Breath Dark set as Global Theme.
Hey guys! Thanks for all the ideas. Sadly, none of them worked as I would have liked.
Anti-aliasing and display scaling were set up to your suggestion by default, I believe. But I would never have thought of looking, if you hadn’t mentioned it, @a-sassermann.
@Mirdarthos, The controls I mentioned, was in the Firefox add-on ‘Dark Reader’. Sorry for the confusion. Everything you mentioned was set as it should be, apparently. I even tried downloading your “arc dark” color scheme(and totally ignoring your warning in the process), but that didn’t help any.
@Aragorn, I tried to mess around with the colors in KMail, but that didn’t seem to do any difference.
I guess I should have uploaded an image in the first post, but I brainfarted on that. Forgive the blur, but that seems like a sensible precaution.
The 1st text field is barely readable without blur, but the yellow field and the white one at the bottom one aren’t. Does that help any?
Perhaps you need to spend more time editing your colours…
The main thing to focus on is contrast… whilst my phone can handle very sharply rendered text being either very dark on a white screen, or white text on a black screen, on my desktop I use a HDTV - and that’s not optimal for rendering fonts.
So I tend to bring down the contrast - start by winding the brightness down from 255 towards 175 for the light text/background, and then wind the brightness up for your dark background…
You just have to try to strike a balance between the contrast, your screen, and your environment.
At the bottom of your colour scheme is a tab for ‘Save As…’ so you can load up something like ‘Sonomatic’ which is actually pretty good - and then save it as ‘01 Sonomatic’ making it your number 1 edit…
I’m a Desktop dark theme fan and I had the same issue with Xfce and their dark themes.
First of all, if using Firefox, disable dark-reader, as the effect on many websites looks awful, as well as obliterating text on some websites such as this one.
I also had an issue with software, eg LibreOffice, where some icon tools at the top of the screen were obliterated (black on a black background). I messed about with LO’s various color schemes, but it made no difference.
In the end I found the solution to use a package’s own dark theme in conjunction with a desktop’s dark theme. Eg in LO’s case I selected ‘View’ (under Options) and select their dark icon theme. Then all the icons became visible. Up to then no-one could help me, including LibreOffice’s own help forum, who recommended not to use a dark Desktop theme…
Because, someone developing these browsers didn’t think of that being an issue, as during this time, most people were using nuke-bright displays with dark text on them, I suppose.
They haven’t listened and adapted to modern habits, where people often use their machines “out-of-hours”.
I guess there was a profit for CRT monitor manufacturers though, as these mostly really bright displays wore out the tube much quicker.
Well, this convo took a turn, sped up and just kept going!
I feel like an ass. @Ben, I saw your pic, and found KColorSchemePicker via KRunner. Started to mess about with it, saved a new scheme and found it in the settings menu. It was a mix of terrible and unusable, but that made me notice that Color Schemes have little buttons if you hover over them. From there it was a simple jump to edit Breath Dark. The only color field I needed to change was called “View Text”, and by default it was set to white. After dropping it into the greys, everything became legible.
And I agree with you, regarding the inverted white-list, on Dark Reader. It’s not a perfect solution, but it does help.
I found a solution that ‘works’. It’s not perfect either, but it’s close enough to what I need, despite not being what I would like.
I truly appreciate all the handholding. Thanks guys!
Edit:
Regarding the Firefox/white glare/dark mode issue, to me it feels a lot like the video game conversation, everybody had in the early 2000’s; Creators vision for the project, vs my consumption. You can make your game/site any way you like, but you don’t get to dictate how I consume it. I think we just need to get over the hurdle of consumers being on the lowest rung of priorities. I have faith
