968877 - Provide some mechanism for custom theming of DevTools

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(DevTools :: Framework, defect)

Description

[Brian Grinstead [:bgrins]]

We would need to further define this, but some users would like to make the look and feel of DevTools somehow match their existing tools and editors.

We could allow a drop-in CSS file that gets loaded on every frame, but this runs into the issue of a user needing to know exactly which selectors and properties need to be styled, and is subject to have regressions in between releases.

An alternative would be to provide a way to set specific CSS variable colors once we can do this for our current default themes in Bug 947242.  This could be done via a color palette setting UI in the options panel, which would likely just be limited just to color and font settings.  It could also be done through loading of a custom CSS file that defines the variables, which would give flexibility to arbitrarily theme things, but allowing arbitrary theming could introduce the risk of regressions as we change markup / css across releases.

Comment 1

[Maxime Thirouin]

+1 for css variables (at least).

Comment 2

[Florens Verschelde :fvsch]

If this is still a goal, we have a number of --theme-* CSS variables that affect maybe two thirds of the UI. (The rest was hardcoded or uses CSS variables specific to a pane.)

See https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/devtools/client/themes/variables.css

Comment 3

[Patrick Brosset <:pbro>]

No this isn't currently a goal. I'm not against starting to think again about this in the future if this fills a gap then.
Closing for now.