Support external user-defined themes (not in code)

[mistersmee]

Currently zulip-term only ships with 4 themes. I would like for there to be an option in zuliprc to define our own themes, for e.g:

[theme]
background = #93a1a1
...

The values can be in hex, RGB, argb, or just plain names, i.e. cyan, etc.

Because right now, the default is similar to Gruvbox, and while I don't hate it, my personal preference for a theme is Solarized Dark.

This way, it also removes the work for you guys to hardcode every single popular theme out there into the application, leaving the customisation other than a default up to us users.

[neiljp]

@mistersmee Thanks for the feedback 👍

Providing or adjusting themes from a configuration file is likely not a high priority item for the project right now - although anyone could work on this of course :)

For a less involved approach to your problem of wanting a specific theme while using ZT, we just improved how easy it is to add internal themes in the git version, so a contribution of that type should be a lot easier - if you or anyone else have a development environment, check out the themes/ folder and the THEME_CONTRIBUTING.md and theme files in there.

Until this issue is otherwise resolved, feedback on that process or theme contributions are most welcome in the meantime!

I thought we had an issue for this, but it's maybe just been discussed in the #zulip-terminal stream on chat.zulip.org.

@Rohitth007 This seems like good motivation to link to the new guide from the existing FAQ entry :)

[mistersmee]

Providing or adjusting themes from a configuration file is likely not a high priority item for the project right now - although anyone could work on this of course :)

Sure, no problem.

For a less involved approach to your problem of wanting a specific theme while using ZT, we just improved how easy it is to add internal themes in the git version, so a contribution of that type should be a lot easier - if you or anyone else have a development environment, check out the themes/ folder and the THEME_CONTRIBUTING.md and theme files in there.

I don't have any experience in Python, but I think I'll take a crack at it in my free time, shouldn't be too difficult with the existing theme files being there as a reference.

Until this issue is otherwise resolved, feedback on that process or theme contributions are most welcome in the meantime!

Sure. And yep, I'd say it's resolved. I'll close the issue.

[neiljp]

@mistersmee I'm going to reopen this as while we can add themes more easily and it's not in current scope, this is a feature we want to track for the future and I expect others to want to raise 👍

[somilbansal11]

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[neiljp]

@somilbansal11 Thanks for your interest! This is a very general issue which will need heavy discussion first. I'd suggest discussing a more specific area you'd like to work on or a particular bug to fix in #zulip-terminal on chat.zulip.org first.