**Goal:**
Design an accent color system and related components for the Plasma desktop and reiterate on the Appearance/Colors UX.
**Motivation:**
While Plasma makes it possible to change the color scheme, it's not presented in the most accessible way. Especially compared to how easy some other OSes make it to easily change the accent color.
**Prior Art:**
[[ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17144/windows-10-change-desktop-background | Windows ]]: {F6880619}
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[[ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/visual-design/dark-mode/ | OSX ]]: {F6880634}
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[[ https://zoringroup.com/blog/2019/06/05/zorin-os-15-is-here-faster-easier-more-connected/ | Zorin OS ]]: {F6880645}
[[ https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-alphablackcontrol | AlphaBlack Control ]]: {F6880663}
@Zren explained how AlphaBlack Control could be adapted in this comment:
>>! In T8755#186648, @Zren wrote:
> The widget basically switches to `breeze-dark` by editing `~/.config/plasmarc`, waits a few seconds, then switches back to `breeze-alphablack`.
>
> https://github.com/Zren/breeze-alphablack/blob/master/desktoptheme.py#L176
>
> Ideally, a dbus signal would be created to force the current desktop theme to reload without needing to switch to a 2nd theme. You'd have to make sure it notify's plasmashell, krunner, latte-dock, etc as they all use plasma theme SVGs. We need the QML Plasma SVG to re-generate the stylesheet injected into the SVG.
>
> To have a separate accent color for the panel we would need to create a new desktop theme in `~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme/`. We'd need to first create:
>
> * `.../desktoptheme/BreezeCustom/metadata.desktop` which should inherit `default`, just like like Breeze Dark.
> * `.../desktoptheme/BreezeCustom/colors` which is generated from our accent color.
>
> Then switch to `BreezeCustom` if we're not already using it.
**Worth looking into: **
This article [[ https://uxplanet.org/designing-systematic-colors-b5d2605b15c | Designing Systematic Colors ]] ([[ https://medium.com/@jordaniusrex/some-of-the-tools-to-create-hue-agnostic-accessible-color-systems-exist-but-to-understand-why-6f601303cfa | and comment ]]) explores some of the challenges with generating related colors. I'll include an example of some [[ https://mineral-ui.com/color#guidelines-ramps | color ramps]] which are generated from one color each, along with some information about the colors including their accessibility ratings according to the [[ https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ | WCAG ]] standard.
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There is also [[ https://github.com/hypeJunction/color-wizard/blob/master/README.md | this implementation ]] of the algorithm based on the aforementioned article:
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Also interesting is [[https://color.adobe.com | Adobe Color]]:
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and [[https://tools.irix.app/ | IRIX Web Tools]] / [[https://irisapp.info | Iris]]:
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We've been discussing this in some recent tasks (T10046, T8755) so I thought I would just open up the discussion.