Hi, so I’m an user who recently migrated from a custom theme (Adapta) back to Adwaita after reading about the problems with the current way of theming and how custom themes might break apps in some cases.
I’m quite interested in how the Theme Engine efforts materialize, so I would like to help if my skills are up to it.
There are two points that I liked about Adapta and would like to see being considered in the Theme Engine discussion: Light theme with dark title bar and customizing padding.
I do think the Light Theme with Dark Title Bar option is significantly important: Android, for example, has a Material.Light theme, a Material.Dark theme and a Material.Light.DarkActionBar theme.
One of the most useful situations to use the Material.Light.DarkActionBar theme is so you can have a light app with a colorful action bar whose elements are white (instead of worrying about changing the color of the elements in case you used the pure Light theme). So, this kind of theme could be useful not only by itself but also as a basis for heavily-customized apps.
One other interesting feature of Android is how it had a unit for font size called “sp” which would change the size of the font on an app based on what was selected on the “Font Size” settings of the device. It would be nice to have something like that for padding, in case the usable screen space is important for users. Another option would be having such a thing as a “basic unit of padding” that could be scaled down or select like “I want 3 times the basic unit instead of 4”.
I will be following closely to see how this unfolds. Thanks for trying to make the theme experience better.