FreeCAD looks for a new default background color

[sliptonic]

Please move the discussion to the GitHub issue so that valuable information is preserved in context.

[NormandC]

even catia changes!

But stays ugly... Those toolbar icons look really dated.

last time I used it their new UI looked better but was pretty buggy, good thing they had an option to use the older look. Nowadays I thing they ditched the entire thing and have a web service instead or something like that.

Is that CATIA V6? It's been around for more than 10 years, but I wonder if the transportation and aeronautics industries have made the switch from V5. I read that the transition from CATIA V4 from V5 was an absolute nightmare because the newer version was not backward compatible or something to this effect.

About 12-14 years ago they tried to base a next generation Solidworks on CATIA V6, which apparently discarded the history-based paradigm and used some kind of direct modelling, but in the face of their user base full-on revolt, they shelved the whole project.

[jimmihenry]

Is that CATIA V6? It's been around for more than 10 years, but I wonder if the transportation and aeronautics industries have made the switch from V5. I read that the transition from CATIA V4 from V5 was an absolute nightmare because the newer version was not backward compatible or something to this effect.

About 12-14 years ago they tried to base a next generation Solidworks on CATIA V6, which apparently discarded the history-based paradigm and used some kind of direct modelling, but in the face of their user base full-on revolt, they shelved the whole project.

CatiaV4 that's UNIX time, huge machines awesome CRT's (UNIX Windows has nothing to do with a with interchangeable file format). Even this version was very powerful. I believe within the V5 branch there was a backwards incompatibility as well, i forgot what release it was. They kept the V5 appearance during the decades, you knew by the second you looked at it it was V5.

By the way Siemens-NX has a superb measuring tool, it is fantastic! It really is
There are so many nice small features that make a CAD program fun to use.

[dork]

CatiaV4 that's UNIX time, huge machines awesome CRT's [...]

IBM Mainframe, Catia V4, loads of 5086 graphic terminals and 50kg CRT's, it still hurt my back as I think of that time...

Things got better with Catia V5 on Power machines but still those heavy CRT's.

[ThanklessLiving]

Mine is set to "simple color" #ffffff as in everything is white.

Outside of FreeCAD it's software based for me, for 3D CAD I use full white, and for 2D CAD/CAM I use black or white background + basic sharp colors (because those are the defaults and I'm used to them)

[Laurie Hartley]

This is an interesting discussion. I must say that I find the scaling along the axes in Openscad rather alluring. That and a simple colour might work well.

Alternatively is there an argument against having the grid as a default in the background?

[Hologram]

I personally prefer the dark theme and for that, because I find bright backgrounds way more tiresome on the eyes. As for the background, I used to have a gradient background that transitions from grey to dark grey, but the thing is, even on 10-bit monitors, I couldn't help but notice severe banding. So nowadays, I just set the background to a single colour instead.
Here's a screenshot of how I configured the look of Blender, with some annotations on things I like about it:

Screenshot 2022-11-03 163103.jpg (600.65 KiB) Viewed 2381 times

Particularly nice are the recurrent, though muted colours for the icons. There are people who prefer really popping icon colours, but I think it's best to use colour to differentiate between them and not have them ask to much attention. Also note that by fading the grid, the eye is fooled into believing there is a gradient going on, while there actually is not.

As for the gradient on the buttons, such a colour combination would work well for things like the ribbon. That avoids an interface that looks too flat, yet it's subtle enough as to not affect the overall colour scheme:

[Kunda1]

@Hologram did you modify a pre-existing stylesheet? There is Blender stylesheet https://github.com/pgilfernandez/FreeCA ... stylesheet perhaps you'd be open to maintaining it ?

[Axeia]

My two cents:
I dislike gradient backgrounds as they distract more than they need and you're always more likely to run into contrast issues when your 'canvas' has more than one color in it.
In addition as previously mentioned it can lead to color banding which just plain looks bad.
Gradients in general have kinda been dropped from most modern interfaces since Windows 7 and Android 5 both stopped using them (not quite sure if I got that Android version right).

So my vote is for a single solid fill colour, which one that is I'm not too peeved about. It kinda has to go with the theme and the other colors. I've been using #424d45 myself which is a bit of a 'gross' color but it does work rather nicely (doesn't singe the eyeballs and seems to contrast well with other colors). One that's somewhat in the middle between bright and dark would probably be best so it doesn't look out of place on a dark or light theme.

[adrianinsaval]

One that's somewhat in the middle between bright and dark would probably be best so it doesn't look out of place on a dark or light theme.

But that would be terrible for contrast with the stuff in the 3Dview, IMO we have to choose either dark or light for default, we can't have it both ways. What we can have is different defaults for dark and for light, and maybe we can detect if the system is using a dark or light theme and adapt to that.