some feedback from bigsur/m1

[nsklaus]

so i can confirm it works for me on bigsur, apple m1 system. i was able to access and modify the *.car files. that's very nice, i could remove the highcontrast white colour from the titlebars and toolbars. i replaced it with a light gray for now as a first step (see attached screenshot below).
many thanks for making this possible @alexzielenski & @jslegendre !

now, as you can see on the screenshot in the terminal i'm seeing a message asking me to report some sort of problem. i'm not sure what it is about, and it didn't prevent the app from working. but as being asked i do report it.

2020-12-14 02:09:35.553 ThemeEngine[1299:25479] WARNING: The SplitView is not layer-backed, but trying to use overlay sidebars.. implicitly layer-backing for now. Please file a radar against this app if you see this.

also, i noticed a tendency for themeengine to crash if i browse the list of 'elements' entries on the left a bit too fast. the steps to reproduce are: click on the first element in the list, wait 1 second then press down arrow key to switch to the next element in the list. repeat this to quickly browse down the list, and after 10 or so elements the app crash. the workaround is to browse more slowly, and save often.

and finally, i was able to drag and drop a bitmap from pixelmator into themeengine to replace an asset. that is nice, but, i was not able to do the opposite, that is: drag and drop an asset from themeengine to pixelmator (or anywhere else). it would be nice to be able to do that. drag and drop from themeengine to pixelmator, modify the asset and then drop it back into themeengine. so far only half of that do work (only import from and not export from).

update:
some more progress on theming big sur:

this is using some of the mohave files. i got back gray gradients and white backgrounds for toolbar buttons.
works everywhere with safari too. looks much better now.
unfortunately no progress on toolbars increased height since bigsur.

[ghost]

Could you,please add me on Discord as a friend once more.. I didn't know who you were so I dismissed the friend invitation.
😔 sorry

[nsklaus]

yes of course, no problem, invitation sent.

[tcptps]

@nsklaus Could you share the modfied Car files ?

[nsklaus]

i gave up on tweaking myself manualy. it takes too long, too much reboots while trying modifications and progressing is too slow because of apple decisions of locking everything up. and i also found a simplier way. here's what i do now to make macos looks like before the bigsur fiasco.

i take the systemappearance.car from catalina, and rename it to vibrantlight.car,
then i do the same with darkappearance.car from catalina, rename it into vibrantdark.car,
i place them both in SystemAppearance.bundle/Contents/Resources/
and done. it's the easiest, fastest yet most complete way i've found so far.

[tcptps]

O.K. thank you very much, now I'll just have to find a Catalina install to Steal the car files.
For a Mac OSX Mavericks (Pre all flattening) Design I found https://github.com/MoonPadUSer/macOSMavericksTheme

Sadly at least for me the problem of FileVault remains.

[nsklaus]

you can test out your ideas, but for myself, i have found that using catalina files like i said above is the most successful choice. it's not 100% but more like 99% for example i have spotted one or two toolbar icons that were not displayed correctly. they are not important or breaking anything but i thought i'd mention it. so far i haven't seen any other problem after two months of use. and so it became the good solution for me. it's easy and quick method to restore good looking to macos. using older themes files though leads to more problems.
if you find other solutions, or better .car files replacement, i'd be interested to hear about it.

[joao]

@nsklaus have you had any luck so far, with the method of copying Catalina files, on macOS 12 (Monterey)?

[nsklaus]

@joao
since a while ago, i started to use macforge with a plugin named 'paintcan'. this had the advantage of simplicity and worked well under bigsur. unfortunately on monterey this is no longer the case. even shell tweaks to disable the new inline title bars for windows like this: defaults write -g NSWindowSupportsAutomaticInlineTitle -bool false don't work any more. macforge support for m1 is a beta version and don't work well on monterey either. as for using themeEngine on monterey, i haven't tried at all since paintcan had a few advantage over themeEgine, namely it had some sort of fallback behavior. for example : when i was using themeEgine, there was a few places where it didn't work well, like safari address bar and also some icons on finder toolbar, whereas on macforge+paintcan everything worked fine.

anyway, regarding macos, apple policy of forcing theme on users and preventing them to change anything is ridiculous. soon i'll be able to switch from macos to asahi linux and get a better desktop this way. apple hardware m1 soc is really good, low heat, low power consumption, high performance it's great. but macos ? it has become ugly and also a pain to use on various levels.

[joao]

@nsklaus thank you for your assessment.
Agree with your perspective, that macOS UI is getting worse and more restricted with each version.
Will stay on 10.15 (Catalina) for now.