The items outside the editor widget are controlled by your desktop theme, so if your desktop isn't dark, neither is that part of Geany.

Although I agree with you that letting random external themes mess with your applications look and feel is a bad idea, the powers that be have determined that its more important that the application looks like the rest of the desktop than it be internally consistent, so this will not change.

But GTK does give you a means of setting individual styles for applications, see the manual.

Closed because behaviour is intended.

I think this is a reasonable enhancement request that could be mostly implemented with not too much work. The three areas as I see it are:

* GTK theme: You can request to be put in "dark mode" like in [@b4n's plugin](https://github.com/b4n/geany-plugin-dark-theme/blob/25fa14a97c2c1f1b1a2d7da3...) which is just a few lines of code.

* Scintilla theme: Not counting actual dark themes, this could be done simply using the existing "invert syntax highlighting colors" functionality.

* VTE theme: I guess this would be similarly invert the foreground and background colours using the libvte API.

Due to above, re-opening and labeling as an enhancement.

Nah, @codebrainz misread my reply, it was not about the amount of work (no matter how suspect @codebrainz estimates are :) but that it is unlikely to be accepted if it makes the application override the theme.

But @codebrainz reference to @b4n's plugin makes the point that there can be no objection to it being implemented as a plugin, just don't enable it if you don't like the result :)

@suntong I will however point out again that you can already control anything the GTK theme can. If you put it in the local geany.css file it will override the theme. It might take some research to find the right CSS selectors, but since that file only affects Geany you can probably be fairly blunt in your selectors.

it is unlikely to be accepted if it makes the application override the theme.

It doesn't really _override_ the GTK+ theme, it just [requests the "dark" variant](https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.2/GtkSettings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-appli...) of the same theme, if one exists. Given that many IDEs/editors these days come out of the box with a dark widget theme (ex. QtCreator, VisualStudio, Atom, VSCode, SublimeText, etc.) it seems like a good use case.

makes the point that there can be no objection to it being implemented as a plugin

Other than it being 60+ lines of boilerplate for 2 function calls :)

Anyway, I think we should leave this open for now since it's a highly requested feature than can be implemented without a lot of code changes if someone feels like doing it. I might have a try at doing it myself if I get bored. Even though you can technically get the same effect by fiddling with several different obscure config files and preferences, IMO it would be super convenient to just have a "dark mode" checkbox that satisfies people who have tired eyes.

Or "Dark mode" plugin, could even extend @b4n's.

It would probably be not much different amount of work exposing Geany internals for inverting the Scintilla colour scheme and providing access to the VTE than it would be to just add a "meta" preference which controls all three 3 things at once in core. Also users have to find the plugin, install it, and active it (ie. it doesn't work out of the box). This seems like as much hassle as hacking around with config files/preferences to get Geany dark.

@suntong no idea about the GTK+ theme issue but for Geany/Scintilla theme, do you have `Preferences->Editor->Display->Invert syntax highlighting colors` ticked?

Hello,

On Debian testing, when GNOME is using a dark theme, Geany seems to have the inverted behavior of the screenshots already present in this issue, ie. the widgets are correctly black but the default theme is white.


The [“gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme” property](https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkSettings.html) could be used to determine if the current theme is light or dark, to select a better default theme given the user’s preferences context.

But a colour scheme contains no information that its light or dark so even if Geany can determine from the GTK theme that it is dark, it can't select a colour scheme since they are not marked light or dark, and even if they were, which one is the best to select as a dark version of whatever the user has chosen as their light colour scheme.

Currently a few themes use the convention of `foo-light.conf` and `foo-dark.conf` for the light/dark variants of a theme, which I suppose could be formalized. It'd have to be not annoying though, perhaps controlled by a preference or something, so that people who like to use a light editor colour scheme with a dark GTK+ theme or vice versa could opt-out somehow (or make it opt-in).

And of course, as with everything, it requires someone who cares enough for the feature to actually design and implement it.

All apps I'm using adjust colors automatically - except the Geany editor widget. Most websites I visit regularly adjust automatically, too.

I would expect your browser does not turn pages dark when the desktop theme changes to a dark theme, it doesn't here.

AFAICT many people want to keep the current situation since they grow used to the colours semantic meaning, its not just coloured to be pretty, the colours have meaning, eg "all types are yellow, strings are green etc" and they don't swap light/dark often enough. So as @codebrainz said, "somebody" for whom it is more important to swap light/dark colour schemes needs to design and implement it.

Well github works the way described by @codebrainz, it chooses between two themes depending on the light/dark setting, but its the only one (of the websites I regularly use) that allows this.

Everyone who works on Geany is a volunteer, they work on what they are interested in and are capable of. They are not directed what to work on. So when/if any specific feature request will be implemented is unknown.

It is unfortunate that this feature is so significant to your use-case that you have to abandon using Geany entirely. No tool is going to be suitable for all and every use-case, I use Vscode for significant C++ projects, but Geany for other less structured uses.

@Carighan that desktop settings menu is setting a _Windows_ theme.

Geany is a portable GTK application and the GTK toolkit uses its own themes. Unlike Linux and BSD, Windows does not set the GTK theme so it has to be done separately. The FAQ https://www.geany.org/documentation/faq/#how-to-change-the-gtk-theme explains how to change it on platforms that do not do so automatically.