This is something that has puzzled and irked me the whole time since I’ve been using SGP, and I’m sure it has bothered others as well. Don’t get me wrong, I love SGP, but why is there no option for a night mode or even just a dark theme for SGP? It seems every other program I use or have used for AP (BackyardEOS, APT, TheSkyX Pro, PHD2, FireCapture, Polemaster, and soon SharpCap) all are either natively dark or have an optional dark/nightmode theme.
Now one might say, “use a red screen program or put a red film on the screen”…however this does not work that well. The bright whites of the SGP interface are still bright even with the screen reddened, and since all other software I’m using is dark, I cannot see anything in those with the redscreen so am stuck flipping on and off the redscreen whenever I want to look at SGP. In addition when it comes to previewing a captured image, I still end up having to remove the redscreen to see the finer details on the image and am then night-blinded by the white interface once again.
How about an optional theme that is dark grey or black background instead of the white-grey, with white or light gray text instead of black?
Looking at the 3.0 update I figured by now this would be on the list of new features. I see plenty of interesting features, but nothing personally worth it to me to pay $79 for. However, I would probably pay that $79 just to have a dark theme option and nothing else. Just saying…
Unfortunately this is not a trivial change and would actually involve rewriting the entirety of the UI. WinForms does not allow for very elegant theme-ing of things. If we were to do this over again we would certainly have picked WPF but there wasn’t as much traction with WPF at the time.
So while I would certainly like to do this the amount of work is extremely high.
Thanks for your reply, Jared. I kind of figured it must be a lot more work than it seems on the surface, otherwise it probably would have been done already!
I’ve been using that and BackyardRed and it’s tolerable for getting SGP set up and running but for actually looking at captured images I can’t see anything when they are completely red. In contrast if I use The SkyX for image capture (which I definitely do not prefer over SGP) its interface is totally dark and so not distracting to use the nightlight either off or very low settings of red and still see all the images fine.
Thank you for the response, Jared. I understand the difficulties. It would be nice at some point to have a WPF interface. Or the newer Windows UI style…Fluent Design they call it? I think if you eventually used that, the built-in dark mode of Windows 10 would kick in automatically… That would be enough for me.
I was looking forward to version 4.0, expecting a dark theme there. But I was disappointed when I downloaded and installed it. No dark theme. Many developers have long abandoned the white background for toolbars. Is it really that hard to make a dark theme? I will wait until a dark theme appears. I see no reason to pay for software that hurts my eyes.
I borrowed a Windows Theme from another astrophographer who did the hard work. I modified it to use Amber for text to make it visible on a dark background without causing too much night blindness. It may be posted on another thread in this forum.
That said, there are a few places where SGP does not use the theme colors. For example, graphs, such as the Autofocus run and Image History, use a bright gray background which is blinding. A black background would be preferable for all graphs using the theme text color.
