Allow for highlight customization

[1412031]

Greetings, that's such an incredible interface you managed to pull together there, congratz!

The only otherwise minor issue my experience are the background colors on the header and footer row which stand out in a distracting way and when coupled with a hardcoded background color and make the UX much less pleasing, at least for me.

There are few approaches that came to mind as a proposed fix, its up to you if and which one you deem most suitable.
The nature of the issue is considered minor by many and deciding to omit such a feature is totally understandable.

1 - Add flag(s) for disregarding background color of the fist and last row. The simplest option as far as I'm concerned.
2 - Add an option for using the default 16 colors already in use. This is the best option for properly integrating any kind of theme via the base16 framework.
3 - Expose an option/flag for setting internal colors eg akin to fzf.
Eg: --color 'fg:#bbccdd,fg+:#ddeeff,bg:#334455,preview-bg:#223344,border:#778899'

Let me know your thoughts, thanks!

[bensadeh]

Hello there!

I'm glad you opened this issue, because this is something I've been thinking about adding for a long time.

I agree that giving the user the option to override the colors is useful. Perhaps the default colors can be improved upon as well.

Would you mind letting me know what color scheme you're using? Since circumflex uses a lot of colors, it's been somewhat challenging finding good foreground and background colors to compliment them well.

[1412031]

Hey, glad you found this interesting.

I use a personal base16 colorscheme which may be very biased against some colors and particularly bad for people depending on colors for readability but at least for me is very aesthetically pleasing, but that's up to the individual I suppose.

I think implementing base16 scheming is the most complete approach for making the application themable, both from available colorschemes perspective as well as allowing for easy customized colors.

You can essentially produce almost any color configuration out of your base16 basic colors via mustache templates which allows for unified theming across multiple applications which is neat.

It would be a good place to start would be making your colors adhere to the standards which by itself will fix the colors for people having their terminal basic colors configured out of the box.

Then once you got that in place its very easy even offering the ability for users to chose from a set of base16 themes effectively implementing theming in your application.

Hope this helps!

[bensadeh]

Thanks again for the feedback.

I decided to move away from custom colors altogether, and now I am only using colors from within the first 16 set by the users color scheme. I hope this will make clx look nicer in the long run. Let me know how the design change looks after the changes.

I can still add options for overriding the theme to change the highlighting for the different elements, but this might require some larger changes first.

[1412031]

Feels great! Exactly what I wished for. Personally my issue is certainly resolved, the interface looks much quieter and calming in perfect harmony with the rest of my system.

Thank you, great job in remarkable time, gratz!

Some quick thoughts,
1 - Setting the horizontal line to 01 or 02 will probably be better aesthetically.
2 - You can try adding a bit of variations by differentiating on highlights of parts of the post overview.
2 points by robin_reala 13 minutes ago
IE assign 08 to "2" and "13" to make them more readable and perhaps add a couple of style points alongside with better accessibility.
If youd like to keep it more minimal color wise, another approach would be lowering the indicator (points, by, time ago) to 03 so that the values automatically stand out on 04 without adding more highlights.
3 - Consider falling back to 03 for more sections for increased contrast, for the numbers enumerating the posts.
4 - Adjust the selection background to 02.
5 - Add 08 to the pager for extra style points and last
6 - Fix this little leftover

Dedicating time to any of this is totally up to you relative to how important you deem aesthetics to be other than that personally my issue is totally taken care of and the UI looks wonderful. I thought I share my feedback in case it helps with perfecting polishing the colors even further.

Thanks for implementing and maintaining such a wonderful tool,
wish you the very best!

[bensadeh]

Thank you for the kind words and for the suggestions 🙏

I think that allowing the colors to be customized is great for use cases like you bring up. Then the user can customize the highlighting in any part of the application. I'll keep this ticket open until we support this feature.