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Sumarious
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Winbox - Darkmode - Please

Sun Feb 21, 2021 6:43 pm

I've got dark mode on my phone, dark theme in windows, my terminal windows are all dark, I have chrome extensions, and scripts to force websites that refuse to adapt and evolve to use custom CSS to make them dark...

I spend my entire workday in front of an array of monitors and have taken every step possible to reduce the amount of blinding white screaming hot photons that would otherwise come blasting into my eye sockets, and then there is Winbox.. Which I have to spend a good portion of my day working with, which I have no ability to tame down. It's just screaming hot bright blinding white light at all times.

Is it really too much to ask that some time be taken to implement an alternative color scheme for this application?

You have a user, who buys, who uses, and deploys tons of your products, in actual physical pain because of the use of Winbox.

Blinding screaming hot white light-induced headaches are not a requested nor desired feature.

Please.
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Sun Feb 21, 2021 7:30 pm

Do like me, put eyeglasses with blu light filtering on that.
I see everything brown but that is ok !
 
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anav
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Sun Feb 21, 2021 9:45 pm

USE CLI ;-)
 
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Sumarious
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Sun Feb 21, 2021 10:52 pm

Do like me, put eyeglasses with blu light filtering on that.
I see everything brown but that is ok !

More like welding goggles...

This is kinda what it feels like to open up winbox...
Image
 
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Znevna
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:45 pm

Ah yes, the only problem left to be resolved in the MikroTik world: a dark mode for WinBox.
As a side note, I have all my monitors set at around 120cd/m2, which is a reasonable value for most home/office environments, no "screaming white light" here.
 
r00t
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Mon Feb 22, 2021 5:40 pm

Yeah, seriously this is LAST thing Mikrotik should be working on at the moment.
Just look around, there are serious bugs, memory leaks, ROS 7 issues, new wireless drivers problems...
 
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inteq
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Mon Feb 22, 2021 9:15 pm

Yes, because changing a color would take an entire team of devs several months. /s
What does WinBox background color have to do with ROS other bugs is beyond me.
 
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erkexzcx
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Tue Feb 23, 2021 10:57 am

or at least option to reverse colors of WinBox :D
 
eddieb
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Tue Feb 23, 2021 11:03 am

Please Mikrotik,

do NOT spent your time on something like Darkmode, it is not neccesary !
Focus on fixing bugs in ROS and prepare for ROS7...
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.  [SOLVED]

Tue Feb 23, 2021 8:05 pm

There is a way - altho not a straightforward one.
Using Linux and Wine, you can force a "theme" for a Wine prefix. You then run Winbox inside that prefix. The theme can override any colors you want.

This is an example of forcing a dark theme for Winbox:
Image

It's not perfect, but it works. If you are running Windows... sorry, no good news for you there.
 
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Sumarious
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Wed Mar 03, 2021 1:49 pm

There is a way - altho not a straightforward one.
Using Linux and Wine, you can force a "theme" for a Wine prefix. You then run Winbox inside that prefix. The theme can override any colors you want.

This is an example of forcing a dark theme for Winbox:
Image

It's not perfect, but it works. If you are running Windows... sorry, no good news for you there.
I am stuck within the Corporate Windows ecosystem.. But I do run the Linux subsystem just so I can have a proper terminal when connecting to all the cloud services I manage...
Installing an xserver might just be worth it.

Thank you very much for this option.
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Wed Mar 03, 2021 7:12 pm

Based on the above wine findings, I have tried to do the same on windows and it sort-of works, but it's not as good.
I have injected DLL into winbox process that replaces GetSysColor API and instead of returning default windows colors, it returns colors from wine dark theme.
This seems to be OK for most elements, but some are still drawn in gray, meaning it's either system control or Winbox gets the color from somewhere else.
GetSysColor.png
For Mikrotik developers: Doing the same in your own code is as simple as making GetSysColor function in your code, so it doesn't get imported from windows DLL and then supplying color values from INI file or some other source. This way you will not have to make any changes to your existing code, this is basically equal to my DLL injection method. (And to call original function, just use LoadLibrary + GetProcAddress).
Based on my screenshot, this seems to do the job for about 80% of GUI elements, rest may be using hardcoded colors or they use windows GUI controls that have fixed colors (these will be probably hardest to change on per-process basis - I think this applies to menus and toolbars, they can be owner-drawn but that requires some extra code to do so).
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Sumarious
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Fri Mar 05, 2021 2:45 pm

Please Mikrotik,

do NOT spent your time on something like Darkmode, it is not neccesary !
Focus on fixing bugs in ROS and prepare for ROS7...
You may prefer the bright white interface of winbox, you may even like all-white walls in your home, you can paint your home all white if you want. No one is asking you or telling you that you have to do otherwise, and the same with winbox, I'm not asking they switch away from the theme that you prefer to work within, but asking that some accommodations be made to those who don't particularly care for it, and who don't personally enjoy the experience of blinding white lite coming off every surface they see.

Why should your personal preference be the only one that matters?
Why should it offend you if I'm given the option to choose a working environment that's pleasant for me when it would affect you in no way whatsoever?

As a user stated below, I'd even be perfectly okay with an external config file that I could write myself to override the defaults, if Mikrotik would simply just allow for it.
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Wed Jun 02, 2021 9:27 pm

+1 for dark theme.. it is shame in 2021..
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Mon Jun 14, 2021 6:37 pm

While I agree there are more important issues to be addressed, dark mode should be very quick to implement (as the wine workaround shows how little you actually have to do). Probably the hardest part would be adjusting any of the menu icons that don't look good against dark.

This is a quality of life thing (at least for those of us who prefer dark mode) and as such is not entirely unimportant.

Also, for some reason this thread is marked [Solved] when it should really be [Awkward Workarounds Exist].
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Mon Jul 19, 2021 7:27 pm

I use only dark themes for everything sitting in front of my displays for all day everyday, Because there's no dark theme for Winbox, I resort to high contrast theme ( ALT + LEFT SHIFT + PRINT SCREEN) fiddle with the settings to get it right for you.

I don't know which is worst the lack of a dark theme or the windows 98 look.
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Sat Jul 31, 2021 11:11 pm

I have forced everything in my life to dark mode.. its so much less stressful on the eyes.. even got "dark reader" on the browser.
I second OP. I understand mikrotik needs to work on other things, but the dark mode is such a simple thing that would bring so much less stress to so many people that
it just makes sense
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Fri Sep 10, 2021 12:58 pm

We need dark mode !!!!! :)
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:31 pm

+1 for dark mode
 
maigonis
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Sun Sep 19, 2021 2:52 am

Use cli, it is dark.
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Fri Oct 29, 2021 4:06 am

+1 we need dark display mode for Winbox GUI.
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Fri Dec 03, 2021 3:29 am

+1 for Dark Mode
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Fri Dec 03, 2021 5:39 am

Don't forget one very important thing, if anything, it should be optional dark mode. Because if WinBox gets irreversibly ruined by changing its UI into unusable blackish stain, there will be uprising too. ;)

And btw, you should complain to Microsoft. WinBox is relatively good at using any system colors you set, it can be white, black, green, yellow, pink, anything you want. Problem is that Microsoft killed this kind of customization in Windows (it's still there, but not exposed to user, and new software more or less ignores it).
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Fri Dec 03, 2021 3:15 pm

Sob: this is very good point, sadly Microsoft is to blame and developers have to spend their time to make workarounds.
Remember how in win7 you could simply install windows theme that nicely applied skin to everything? Then came win10 and M$ completely ruined everything, you only get to choose if you want pitch tar black or nuclear white flash theme, nothing in between. Art of GUI design completely disappeared and with win11 it got even worse.
I work as a developer and we have spent few months adding custom skin and theming to every GUI element in our software because after win11 release enough was enough. To get decent looking GUI you simply have to do everything yourself, system will only ruin your work if you let it do so.
On this note, I think best solution from Mikrotik would be to move color definition to file, simple .ini config file with RGB values for all elements. This can be done quite easily (replace win32 api functions that get colors from system by function that read the value from .ini file) and then it would be possible for anyone to customize any color by simply editing this file. No need to spend time making dark color theme, community would do that for them.. Just make the colors editable.
That said, I think right now everyone should be working on ROS7 to make it stable, as that's much bigger priority. I really don't care how winbox looks like as long as my BGP router runs correctly...
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:11 am

+100000000 for dark mode
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Sun Dec 05, 2021 4:06 pm

Use "Blue light filter" in Windows 10 .... for a start ?
https://www.pcworld.com/article/394952/ ... ws-10.html
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Fri Jan 07, 2022 7:32 pm

+1 for Darkmode!
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Mon Jan 31, 2022 12:15 am

+1 for Darkmode!
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Wed Mar 30, 2022 2:18 pm

Here is another option if using wine or Crossover. It works in Windows too but you may or may not want the theme for your whole system.

https://gist.github.com/Zeinok/ceaf6ff2 ... 0199d89398
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - Please.

Thu Jul 07, 2022 9:14 am

win 11, use this bro...

Accessibility > Contrast theme
winbox contrast themes.png
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - Please

Mon Dec 05, 2022 10:15 pm

+1 for dark mode

BR.
 
arifsetyo21
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - For the love of God, Please.

Tue Feb 07, 2023 9:46 am

There is a way - altho not a straightforward one.
Using Linux and Wine, you can force a "theme" for a Wine prefix. You then run Winbox inside that prefix. The theme can override any colors you want.

This is an example of forcing a dark theme for Winbox:
Image

It's not perfect, but it works. If you are running Windows... sorry, no good news for you there.
i try this on wine, and it works
https://gist.github.com/Zeinok/ceaf6ff2 ... 0199d89398
 
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - Please

Sun May 14, 2023 3:30 pm

A little modified colour settings for Winbox, more easy on the eyes ...
Image
Last edited by givbra on Sun May 14, 2023 3:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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krafg
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Re: Winbox - Darkmode - Please

Fri Jun 30, 2023 12:18 am

Works but breaks all other Windows apps.

Regards.

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