Lazarus Release 4.0

[Martin_fr]

I'd rather rely on the room lighting to keep my pupils small. I don't like staring directly at bright light sources such as lamps, the sun, or white editor backgrounds 

1) Which means, your eyes need to adjust when you switch from looking at the screen and elsewhere.

2) light theme is in no way bright light. Set up your monitors brightness (or contrast if it does not have brightness) correctly.
As I said, many monitors come with very bright defaults. That doesn't mean they can't be used with less.
Depending on your monitor, the settings may be between 50% and 75% of the max brightness. And yes, for the first 5 to 10 minutes your brain will tell you that the white background is now grey. Your brain should adjust its perception rather quickly.

But yes, the room lightening is also important.

As a correct monitor settings. Wrong sub-pixel settings together with anti aliasing, dpi scaling (or an editor that uses sub-pixel resolution / Lazarus does not) can blur the display. And depending on the mix of your screen type and the selected wrong setup, this may manifest differently depending on which colors are in use (and light vs dark changes those colors).

Also unless you paid several $1000 your screens colors may not be accurate. This means that contrast between default color settings may be different between different screen hardware. For some screens therefore it may be needed to change some of the supplied colors (e.g. make blue strings darker/brighter or slightly change the amount of other base colors mixed into that blue. (But that can happen for dark themes too)

Of course if you have an extremely bad monitor, and the white of surrounding pixels bleeds into the glyphs of the text, then a light theme will be a problem. In a dark theme that will just mean the text gets printed "bold"-er /-ish.

[flowCRANE]

Interesting... I use a light theme, exactly because it is better for the health of the eyes.

Yes, interesting — interesting that people have their own preferences.

Discussing the theme is pointless, because the choice of theme depends on many conditions and personal preferences. It is fitting to finally note that there is a huge group of PC users who prefer dark windows instead of white ones. I have no problem with someone preferring the light theme, but I do have a problem with someone claiming the light theme is better for me (or someone else) when they have no idea about my biology or what my workstation looks like.

Unfortunately, many people cannot understand this and instead prefer to gaslight and polarize people (I do not mean anyone in this thread). So it is pointless to argue about which theme is better, because better is simply what someone prefers. The only important thing is that everyone can choose something for themselves, and that's why we have the MetaDarkStyle package (and Qt, if anyone would like to use it).

[munair]

I still use white backgrounds and simply cannot and won't get used to trending dark background app development.

We do not install dark themes because of trends, but because of necessity — we simply prefer to look at less intense and bright screen content, saving our eyesight and extending working time.

Who's we?

[Martin_fr]

It is fitting to finally note that there is a huge group of PC users who prefer dark windows instead of white ones.

That I have no problem with. And (I think) I have not in any way shown dismissal of any such preference. If any statement of mine was unclear and misunderstood in such a way, then I offer my apologies.

I do have preferences, against wich there may be good arguments  (be that financial, medical, ...). But they please me, and harm no other, so I entertain them.

[LeonTN]

Sorry for my English. I had a problem installing the package anchordockingdsgn 1.0 that provides single-window mode. In previous versions of Lazarus I used the package , but in the latest version when installing it, a message appears "lazarus version control client not in path". Maybe someone knows where and how to specify the correct path?

[flowCRANE]

Who's we?

We, the users who prefer the dark theme.

That I have no problem with. And (I think) I have not in any way shown dismissal of any such preference.

That's why I wrote "I do not mean anyone in this thread". Unfortunately, not everywhere users are as friendly as here. Some people, for unknown reasons, try to fight the dark theme, including resorting to such nonsense as stating that the dark theme is bad because in the 90's all IDEs were white (sic!). Sad and ridiculous.

I do have preferences, against wich there may be good arguments  (be that financial, medical, ...). But they please me, and harm no other, so I entertain them.

I think that since the theme is an individual matter, using any one does not harm anyone.

[marcov]

That's why I wrote "I do not mean anyone in this thread". Unfortunately, not everywhere users are as friendly as here. Some people, for unknown reasons, try to fight the dark theme, including resorting to such nonsense as stating that the dark theme is bad because in the 90's all IDEs were white (sic!). Sad and ridiculous.

Indeed, that is ridiculous, since this is a Pascal forum, thus the IDEs were yellow on blue as they should be.

[flowCRANE]

In high school I studied Pascal in TP7 — I'm glad those tortures ended long ago.

[mas steindorff]

Which also means: your pupils having to open wider (as they do if it is darker). Which in turn means the focal field (not sure if that is the correct English term) becomes more narrow, and your eyes have to put in more work to keep the exact focus.
...

It 1s far easier to see a flashlight on the mountain than a black t-shirt. too much noise make us hard of hearing, too much light on our focus point over rides our side vision.  I'll stick to dark backgrounds.

[zeljko]

Sorry for my English. I had a problem installing the package anchordockingdsgn 1.0 that provides single-window mode. In previous versions of Lazarus I used the package , but in the latest version when installing it, a message appears "lazarus version control client not in path". Maybe someone knows where and how to specify the correct path?

It is installed by default with Lazarus 4.0, don't know about version control client error.

[Martin_fr]

a message appears "lazarus version control client not in path".

I have never seen this. But maybe (just a guess), when you go
Menu: Tools > Configure build lazarus

Then there is a checkbox "Update version.inc"  (at the bottom, 3rd checkbox).
Maybe this needs to be unchecked (NOT checked).


The package should be installed already (but maybe if you did build from source, then something prevented that?)

[Jonax]

I'm a bit late to the party but am pleased to mention I managed to install the 4.0 in a brand new Virtual Machine (AMD64 Debian).
No problems encountered so far. A test program complied and seems to run well.

Many thanks to the teams making this possible 

[munair]

What I noticed about the docked interface (at least on W11) is when the form designer is on top and I adjust a setting of a control property in the object inspector, the form designer doesn't stay on top. This is very impractial, so I switched back to the undocked interface, which offers much more flexibility arranging the various windows as needed.

[Martin_fr]

What I noticed about the docked interface (at least on W11) is when the form designer is on top and I adjust a setting of a control property in the object inspector, the form designer doesn't stay on top. This is very impractial

IMHO, you should use the docked IDE with the "DockedFormEditor" also enabled.

You can have a "floating" IDE with or without DockedFormEditor.
But a docked IDE with floating designer may indeed not be the most practical choice.

[CM630]

I installed/ uninstalled Lazarus 4.0.0 in Linux (Mint Cinnamon) several times.
Now the “modern” design is gone. I uninstalled and then installed *dock*.lpk - still no modern look.