Hello,

I am using Breeze widget style on Plasma 5.1. Breeze is very awesome and it takes design to just another level. I have two things to that have come to my notice.

1. I have around 25-30 folders in KMail. They used to be rendered in a view in my 14" screen without any scrollbars when using Oxygen widget style. Now that I am using Breeze widget style at least 11 folder names are hidden under scrollbar when using 22x22 icons like in Oxygen and 7-8 folders are hidden when using 16x16 icons.

2. Because of the added space around elements the whole themes looks very boxy with sharp corners. I am sure this is being worked out because if we want to make something look clean and nicely spreadout we will have to think about what is important enough to be put on the face of the app. Otherwise you end with a window with scrollbars in every direction.

Thanks.

You can read the background in this thread viewtopic.php?f=285&t=123519

I talk yesterday with an developer he told be that breeze theme looks realy nice on large screens, but on smal screens (14'') the icons will be less easy to understand. When you look at the oxygen icons the icons have no padding the breeze icons use padding.

I don't know a solution but I think we have to discuss the breeze theme at different sizes.

andreas_k wrote:You can read the background in this thread viewtopic.php?f=285&t=123519

I talk yesterday with an developer he told be that breeze theme looks realy nice on large screens, but on smal screens (14'') the icons will be less easy to understand. When you look at the oxygen icons the icons have no padding the breeze icons use padding.

I don't know a solution but I think we have to discuss the breeze theme at different sizes.

True, we shouldn't make assumption on what a user might be using. AFAIK general users mostly tend to use lower end devices. Not everyone gets to buy a 4K device.

There is a tiny size option of Breeze, which is roughly the same size as normal Plastik. I also think it should be default and there should be one size smaller still available. But at least it is there.

I think this concern should be taken seriously. To be honest, I really like the design, but the size is simply a no go for me.
The smaller the screen, the more obvious the issue and it can be quite annoying if things do not fit the screen. I think that has nothing to do with good design to scale
the whole widget style up like that.

I really would like to discuss this, I have heard from a lot of people they do not feel comfortable with the size the new style takes. To be honest: I find Breeze really attractive, but the size really annoys me. Just look at the menu bar of kmail in this screenshot (especially the highlighted item):

Kubuntu 15.04 plans the ship Plasma 5 by default, but I would still like to be able to consistently use Oxygen for all apps (qt4, qt5, gtk2, gtk3). However that does not seem possible, as the Oxygen style also seems to have the (imho clunky) size measures. Does anyone know how I could achieve this? Compiling software is no problem.

Hugo, would it be possible to have an option to scale down the size consistently?

I also would also really like to add to this dicussion that this is the first time KDE gets a proper design with buttons that are not squeezed to the text size and other inconsistencies. I understand that some professional/old-style users love to have everything small, really small and tiny. While there might be certain smaller aspects still to be dicussed, I generall love wider menus larger buttons, and the feeling of a design that can breath and is state of the art. I hate UIs that have to many elements packed together in a small space and hope these things won't be changed (radically). We're not in the world of 1024x768 Monitors anymore

What ever happened to the option to hide the menu bar and have a button in the window decoration? That would definitely make the breeze theme use much less space.

That does not solve the issue, it more a workaround. Personally I think the space the menu bar in this screenshot takes is neither visually pleasing nor practical. The same goes for other elements too. The design of Breeze is great, however it would still be great if the size measures would be better.
I mean I understand the argument that white space is not automatically bad and I agree with it to a certain extent, however on low resolution displays this is simply too much. Try it in a virtual machine to see what I mean.

Meanwhile the Oxygen widget style is mature and consistent. I would like to be able to use it on Plasma 5, like I said earlier and Hugo mentioned it wont go away to soon. So I am asking myself: How can I get Oxygen with the old size measures for all my applications till I find Breeze to be ready for other tool kits?

kdeuserk wrote:That does not solve the issue, it more a workaround. Personally I think the space the menu bar in this screenshot takes is neither visually pleasing nor practical. The same goes for other elements too. The design of Breeze is great, however it would still be great if the size measures would be better.
I mean I understand the argument that white space is not automatically bad and I agree with it to a certain extent, however on low resolution displays this is simply too much. Try it in a virtual machine to see what I mean.

Meanwhile the Oxygen widget style is mature and consistent. I would like to be able to use it on Plasma 5, like I said earlier and Hugo mentioned it wont go away to soon. So I am asking myself: How can I get Oxygen with the old size measures for all my applications till I find Breeze to be ready for other tool kits?

more or less off topic comments/answers
- Starting for gtk+ 3.15, oxygen-gtk3 will be dead because gtk team removed (as opposed to deprecated) the API it is built on. There is no remplacement foreseen (not by me at least, since I find the above unacceptable)

- for the 'resized' (larger margins) oxygen, it can be built for both KDE4 and KF5, the same way as breeze can. Admittedly, oxygen @ gtk2 is still 'tiny' margins

- for breeze, making a css theme for the gtk3 version should not be too much of a big deal, provided that gtk3's css theming is much better documented as it was until the 'very recent' past, and the the CSS API has finally stabilized. But still one would need a volunteer to do so. However there is no easy way to make it adopt the same color palette as KDE (In fact I don't even know hot to make it configurable)

- making a gtk2 version of breeze is (much) more work and has 0% overlap with the gtk3 version

kdeuserk wrote:Hugo, would it be possible to have an option to scale down the size consistently?

Yes, provided that someone comes with a consistent set of sizes (and that designers agree to implement such a thing)
the current sizes, margins etc. have been taken from the QML implementation

If people are willing to play around with breeze's style metrics, in the code they are all stored in breeze/kstyle/breeze.h, with hopefully explicity enough names. Anyone that can compile breeze, can alter these metrics, recompile, and see the result. I can implement any satisfying set of metrics from there, and even make them loadable from config files.

hugo.pereira@free.fr wrote:- for breeze, making a css theme for the gtk3 version should not be too much of a big deal, provided that gtk3's css theming is much better documented as it was until the 'very recent' past, and the the CSS API has finally stabilized. But still one would need a volunteer to do so. However there is no easy way to make it adopt the same color palette as KDE (In fact I don't even know hot to make it configurable)

- making a gtk2 version of breeze is (much) more work and has 0% overlap with the gtk3 version

So if I understand this right you do not plan to implement gtk versions personally, because gtk2 seems old and may disappear soon (and requires a lot of work of course) and gtk3 broke everything?
A decision I can fully understand, kudos for providing us with an amazing widget style for all those years across almost all applications, you are amazing!
I will have a look at the header when I have the chance. Thanks for your reply!

hugo.pereira@free.fr wrote:

kdeuserk wrote:Hugo, would it be possible to have an option to scale down the size consistently?

Yes, provided that someone comes with a consistent set of sizes (and that designers agree to implement such a thing)
the current sizes, margins etc. have been taken from the QML implementation

If people are willing to play around with breeze's style metrics, in the code they are all stored in breeze/kstyle/breeze.h, with hopefully explicity enough names. Anyone that can compile breeze, can alter these metrics, recompile, and see the result. I can implement any satisfying set of metrics from there, and even make them loadable from config files.

Thanks for making it so easy to experiment Hugo. You're right there are certainly spacing and consistency issues in the QML implementation, so I have no doubt that you've been faithful in your implementation.

I'd like suggest that perhaps we sort out some of the minor consistency issues first then, once those are resolved, we take a look and see if the style-wide metrics regarding spacing need to be reduced. I'll start experimenting as you suggest to try to address some of the consistency issues. They include:

• Setting the menu bar height to the the same height as menu entries
• Setting table headers to the same height as buttons/linedits or table items.

if anyone else experiments with the metrics as Hugo suggests, please share here. For clarity again though, please don't waste a lot of time reducing the spacing to oxygen levels as that is simply out of line with the design goals of Breeze. There are many things we can do to refine the spacing with the style that goes beyond simply removing spacing. Part of creativity in design is working within a set of design constraints.

kdeuserk wrote:So if I understand this right you do not plan to implement gtk versions personally, because gtk2 seems old and may disappear soon (and requires a lot of work of course) and gtk3 broke everything?

Yes, that's pretty much the situation as of today.

kdeuserk wrote:A decision I can fully understand, kudos for providing us with an amazing widget style for all those years across almost all applications, you are amazing!

Many thanks ! much appreciated !

Hugo

alake wrote:

• Setting the menu bar height to the the same height as menu entries
• Setting table headers to the same height as buttons/linedits or table items.

Thanks to Hugo's fantastic work these (plus a couple other tweaks) are now done. THANKS Hugo!