napari: switching themes causes incomplete updates

🐛 Bug

The ‘light’ theme for napari is looking pretty terrible these days:

We should update it and make sure that any PRs that touch the UI are tested with both themes.

Also worth noting that the base layer needs to have blending mode “translucent” — with additive, you get a totally white canvas. Perhaps it’s a chance to play with inverted LUTs or something, not sure.

Finally, I’m not sure whether there is a way to set the theme globally. I could set it on a Viewer instance, but I could not set it on the napari.Viewer class. It seems to me that it should be more of a global than an instance setting.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

import napari
v = napari.Viewer()
v.theme = 'light'

This crashes:

import napari
napari.Viewer.theme = 'light'
v = napari.Viewer()

This makes sense because it replaces a property with a text string! But I couldn’t find how else to set the theme.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 5 years ago
Reactions: 1
Comments: 22 (21 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

yeah, it’s the switching. If I hard-code in the theme it looks fine, and here’s what it looks like when I switch back (inverted problem from above). so that should help narrow it down

note also: that the console button switched back to the darktheme after I clicked on it… but the other control buttons did not switch upon clicking

tlambert03 on Nov 11, 2019

here’s a different mac, this one a macbook pro on mojave. Interestingly, this one didn’t even try in the controls area. Strange that we’re seeing more than just 2 phenotypes!

napari, 0.2.4+12.g6c5bb037
Qt, 5.13.1
NumPy, 1.17.3
SciPy, 1.3.1
VisPy, 0.6.1
scikit-image, 0.16.2

Platform: Darwin-18.7.0-x86_64-i386-64bit
Python:   3.7.3 | packaged by conda-forge | 
   (default, Jul  1 2019, 14:38:56)  [Clang 4.0.1 (tags/RELEASE_401/final)]
Backend:  PySide2
GL version:  '2.1 NVIDIA-12.0.24 355.11.10.50.10.103'
MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE: 16384

tlambert03 on Nov 11, 2019

@sofroniewn please note the problem above. If someone uses code where all the layers have blending mode “additive” (as channel_axis=n does), then the image is just all white if the canvas is white. That’s a problem.

Regarding the platform dependence: I’m on Catalina, are you? And, can you try with a fresh install from pip? (I am trying it now, but am on a crappy connection so it might take me a while.)

jni on Nov 11, 2019

I think black background is more comfortable as white could possibly interfere with image edges or with some other layers. Not a big deal but just to me black background by default makes more sense.

AhmetCanSolak on Nov 11, 2019

Discussing here is good @AhmetCanSolak. I’m completely open to that, and it’s easy to change, but curious why do you think black is a better canvas background for both themes? I guess it might be more consistent, but I though it looked nicer to have a white background with the light theme. @jni were you suggesting this too? I think @alexdesiqueira was someone who was excited about the light theme if I remember correctly 😃 so curious what they prefer

sofroniewn on Nov 11, 2019

@jni theme looks fine on my mac so this might be something cross platform 😦

@marciovm we’ve had comments from people who prefer light to dark. The way we’ve set it up should make it pretty easy to maintain both - we have color palettes and style using the palettes, but something funky seems to be happening above 😦

sofroniewn on Nov 11, 2019