Edit: After much poking around, I figured out that you can click on the “Pick” (eye dropper) icon at the top of the Theme Editor, then click on any interface element in the real eM Client app, and it will bring up those colors directly in the Theme Editor. This, along with the “replace color everywhere” option in the color palette, basically cures my complaints below.
–
The new theme editor is great, but it’s really too tedious to edit 200+ color elements – especially when in most themes, there are lots of UI parts that share the same color palette. There should be a way to pick 6 main colors to use in a theme and have the editor automatically generate nice looking variations of those colors for all of the different interface elements (e.g. lighter for unselected, bolder for hover, etc). Maybe even some basic slider controls to adjust how light or how bold or how unsaturated we want the variations to be.
There are always going to be those who are not satisfied with anything.
Previously, to edit a theme you had to export an installed theme and then edit it with a text editor, not knowing for sure what you were changing was the correct item, nor if what you changed would be valid format. There was absolutely no documentation to refer to either, so complete hit and miss, and you had to look up color codes on the web. Then you had to load the edited theme back into eM Client just to get a preview, and then do it all over again if you did not get it quite right.
This new Theme Editor makes so much difference for those who want to change the appearance of their favorite email client. And it is so easy, and no other email client has that option.
Well, we did our best to bring Theme editing to wide public and as Gary mentioned, eM Client is the only client that offers such tool. The problem is that eM Client is so complex that it would be hard to find these 6 colors, so you have several options how to work with Theme editor.
Start with a predefined theme and change only the colors you want.
Create a Theme from one color (New -> Create from Color)
There is also a nice and quick way how to speed up the process of changing colors,
so you don’t need to change the colors one by one.
It is called Replace the color everywhere. This tool enables you to replace one color on all the other places within one click, so for example if you want to change colors of all buttons, you just need to change it once and use this Replace the color everywhere tool.
However we are open to new ideas that come from your feedback and we’ll consider additional improvements of Theme editor, but be aware that the theming support in eM Client is so versatile and complex that it is not really trivial to make the tool that simple.
We are also preparing a blog post with some basic guide for the Theme editor and answers to some frequently asked questions, so if you have some specific issues or questions let us know and we’ll try to answer them. We really want to support the community to build amazing new themes for eM Client.
One thing missing from the Theme Editor (which is a real shame in my view) is the ability to change the size of some elements. In particular - the calendar days bar height (in month view) and the size of the fonts for the days (Mon Tue etc…). this is the only blocker for me to upgrading to V8 from V7 as I find the calendar unusable on my 13" laptop with 1366x768 resolution. I can only see a couple of events on each day due to this padding. In my opinion a theme is more than just colours and I think its an opportunity missed.
Okay, so I just noticed that the “Pick” icon at the top of the Theme Editor actually is NOT a color picker – rather it’s a way that you can click on various interface elements in the real eM Client app and it will bring up the exact part of the editor where those colors can be changed. Brilliant! I would suggest a different icon since the “eye dropper” is standard for “color picker” and/or change the text from “Pick” to “Interface Selector” or “Choose Element” or something that’s a bit more enticing to click on.
