Re: [gentoo-user] tuning desktop appearance for legibility

[Caveman Al Toraboran]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Thursday, September 3, 2020 6:50 PM, John Blinka <john.blinka@×××××.com> wrote:

> Hi, Everyone,

hello big dawg!

quick point: imo the problem of gray texts on
white backgrounds, or scrollbars or whatever, that
you have, is not related to aging.  imo it's
rather related to stupid web developers.  not even
a mutant with infrared vision can use these
websites.


> 1) How  do you cope with this problem?

i cope by these:

    - use pixel-based fonts for everything as much
      as possible, specially for key apps like:
      terminal, window manager and browser.

      they become so much readable.  i use
      "terminus-font" (and previously used "dina")
      in my urxvt as well as my other apps as much
      as i can.

      i notice one of the major problems with
      fonts is actually not our eyes, but in many
      cases how fancy fonts blur.  i was
      personally amazed by how i could use much
      smaller fonts, while maintaining
      readability, by simply switching to
      pixel-based fonts, such as terminus.

    - for my browser, i use custom user css for
      different modes.  i also configured
      shortcuts for my browser, so that i change
      these user css files based on which ones
      work best with the site.  generally, i have
      "night.css" and "wiki.css" that i change by
      keyboard shortcuts.  the "night.css" is very
      generic and changes background/foreground
      texts for pretty much 90% of sites properly.

      this way, i am no longer bound by bad colors
      chosen by web designers.

    - i use i3 as window manager, with lots of
      shortcuts.  i also use qutebrowser (a
      browser with good vim shortcuts).

      this way, throughout the day, i rarely end
      up needing to use the mouse to do things.  i
      only use the mouse for ultra quirky websites
      with fancy javascript links that are not
      clickable by qutebrowser's shortcuts.

      so thanks to using keyboard shortcuts, a
      website can have thin gray scrollbar on a
      gray background and i don't care.  because i
      scroll by shortcuts, not by bars.  in fact,
      my qutebrowser's interface has scrollbars
      disabled altogether to use pixels, which i
      paid dear money for, for real use.


> 2) Is there an xfce theme and icon package you
> recommend?  Or maybe something other than xfce? 
> I like xfce, and have never been attracted to
> integrated desktops like kde and gnome, but if
> they’ve got a credible solution, I’m willing to
> try.

i would suggest try keyboard-based window
managers.  my 1st suggestion is i3.  it's actually
perfectly usable for all applications.  it's
tiling-based, but also has floating functionality,
and does a fine job eliminating need of clicking
around on tiny things.

> 3) Are there lower level ways of tweaking my
> current desktop?  For example, changing colors
> in the 2 examples I gave above from black on
> dark gray to black on white?  Could that be done
> with a little judicious editing of color
> settings somewhere, or adjusting colors on an
> icon?  I don’t know how desktop appearances are
> programmed, so I don’t know where on the
> spectrum of trivial->apocalyptic this lies.

user style sheets.  maybe have a look here
(i also talked about it above):
    https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/css

or, if you dislike fiddling with these, maybe some
use some browser add-ons that offer things like
"night mode", or "contrast mode", by which they
apply their own custom styling to fix mistakes of
web designers.


-------------------------------------------------
optional/offtopic:  extra text if you have coffee
-------------------------------------------------
i think this problem that we have could've been
avoided if the web was originally designed to only
deliver content, without any power to dictate
appearance, so that appearance is 100% a task that
a local client should choose.

imo this could've been done easily, because
websites in the internet follow a finite number of
"document classes" (if we call them so).  the vast
unique changes that web designers make are just
pointless.

if the web was designed this way, then today we
would've had a much happier time of achieving 100%
consistent look for all websites optimized for our
readability.  but too bad, that is not done, so we
have to use custom user style sheets which works
for most of the time.

for people who really want js and fancy rendering,
they could use a separate app for their "instant
js games".  there is absolutely no reason why the
entirety of the web has to be so turing-complete
just because someone wants to play games.