Enhancement: Add dark mode option with default detection of system theme

[leonidasIIV]

Please add a Dark mode theme for the application with option for user to select theme. Theme selections could be as follows:

• Auto: (default): Uses the System Theme
• Light: Uses the Light Mode Theme
• Dar: Uses the Dark Mode Theme

Several WPF Theme libraries exist for use if third-party libraries/code is acceptable. Including, but not limited to:

• Modern WPF
• WPF Dark Theme
• Dark Net
• Syncfusion Themes Material Dark WPF

[tylercamp]

I looked into this a few times since I started and all the WPF themes I found either had usability, completeness, or licensing issues

I don’t have the experience to fill in gaps (missing controls/states) in the themes and don’t want to dump a bunch of time into it

I considered porting to Avalonia, which has built in dark themes and generally more useful controls available, but the EXE size jumped to 100MB (back when I had asset compression still enabled) and I was having issues with the WYSIWYG editor in Visual Studio

I’d really like to have a dark theme but it just hasn’t been worth the effort

I’m ok with leaving this open if someone else wants to try their hand at updating

[tylercamp]

Looking into these again, skipping "Modern WPF" since all the whitespace messes with the layouts

# Syncfusion

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Syncfusion Blend:

Material3 Light:

Material3 Dark:

Material Light:

Material Dark:

Metro:

Fluent Light:

Fluent Dark:

System Theme: (I had dark system theme in Windows at the time)

Windows 11 Light:

Windows 11 Dark:

# Adonis

---

Dark:

Light:

# .NET 9 Fluent

(Build into .NET 9)

---

Dark:

Light:

# WPF-UI

---

Dark (don't know what's going on with this one, docs are sparse):

# WPF Dark Theme (New)

---

Soft Dark:

Light:

Grey:

Deep Dark:

Dark Grey:

# WPF Dark Theme (Old)

---

Dark:

Colourful Dark:

Light:

Colourful Light:

[tylercamp]

Took another stab at this and am more confident about getting these themes working

My screenshots above include all of the relevant themes which are comprehensive and have light + dark modes

• SyncFusion
  • From all of their options I like the Windows 11 Light and Dark themes the most, but IMO they're still not that great
  • The licensing model for this is weird, I think anyone who wants to work on Pal Calc with these themes will need to contact SyncFusion and get their own open-source license?
• Adonis
  • Could use some tweaks but this is one of my preferred options. It's not great, but the light + dark themes are very readable and the themes themselves are okay
• .NET 9 Fluent
  • Incomplete atm, ignoring for now
• WPF-UI
  • Couldn't get this to work right, not sure what the issue is
• WPF Dark Theme (New)
  • Soft Dark and Deep Dark are some of my favorite dark themes out of all of these options
  • The Light theme doesn't look great
• WPF Dark Theme (Old)
  • Dark theme is very similar, but not as good as, the dark themes in the (New) version
  • Light theme looks a lot better than the (New) version

These are my choices:

• Adonis
• WPF Dark Theme (New) - Soft Dark or Deep Dark, don't use any Light theme (no theme selector in app either)
• WPF Dark Theme (Old) - Regular Dark and Light themes

@leonidasIIV Do you have any thoughts on the above?

[RevanFan1]

Hey @tylercamp, I wasn't able to reply to your message to me on Reddit about dark mode but I did see it. Of the two screenshots you sent me, I prefer the first one.

[tylercamp]

@RevanFan1 Thanks for the feedback - that’ll be the Adonis theme which I’ve been tweaking; the referenced screenshot is below