Missing Colours properties

rgb

Problem

We don't know system defaults color for control,window

Proposed Solution

Colour.FocusRingColor
Colour.backgroundControlColor
Colour.labelControlColor
Colour.ListBoxSelectedRowColor

.....

Example Workflow

Alternatives Considered

Who Would This Help?

Garry

I agree this would be useful, especially for custom drawing and controls that need to sit naturally beside the built-in desktop controls.

My current thinking is that these should not be fixed Colour constants, because they are theme-dependent and can change with light/dark mode or accent changes. I’m leaning towards a separate desktop API, something like:

SystemColours.WindowBackground
SystemColours.ControlBackground
SystemColours.LabelText
SystemColours.FocusRing
SystemColours.SelectionBackground
SystemColours.SelectionText
SystemColours.Accent

The open question is what these should represent:

Native operating system colours, as far as each platform exposes them.
The actual Avalonia theme colours that Objo desktop apps are using.

I’m inclined toward option 2 because it would make custom drawing match Objo’s controls more reliably, and it should behave more consistently across macOS, Windows, and Linux. Native colours sound attractive, but the mappings are uneven across platforms and may not always match what the Avalonia controls are actually rendering.

I’d be interested in what others expect here: should SystemColours mean “the platform’s native colour values” or “the colours used by the current Objo/Avalonia desktop theme”?

bgrommes

Garry I agree. All device GUI frameworks end up being opinionated, regarding whether to slavishly use native controls on each platform, or render the exact same control on all. Whether or not I agree with your decision (FWIW, I do, and pretty strongly), you should lean into it or your abstraction will start leaking. For those who wish you had decided otherwise, the only thing worse than living with no native controls is leaky abstractions around it, I would think.

Also I suspect "as far as each platform exposes them" is doing a lot of work here. I'd stick with what Avalonia exposes and uses, which, hopefully is consistent on all the platforms. They've already done the mediating uniform wrapper -- might as well leverage it.

rgb

Hi,
UI are Avalonia, for me option two are the best

Garry

Added for the next release: https://feedback.objo.dev/feature/258