Support Board
Date/Time: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 20:33:29 +0000
Product Suggestion for 2025: Support the Windows 11
View Count: 540
| [2024-12-14 14:43:42] |
| Jedi Trader - Posts: 14 |
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Product Suggestion for 2025: Support the Windows 11 Theme Settings [My post title was truncated] Dark themes are popular with users. Your support board contains at least a half dozen requests over at least 7 years to add proper support for this. Even your web-site supports a dark theme. Many additional financial markets and platforms are shifting to 24 hours, and the last thing traders want at 3 AM in the morning is to have white light projecting out at their faces from an array of 4K monitors. There are available hacks, including installing third party themes; however, these are extremely invasive (they affect other applications) and way outside the main Windows model. Guidance from YouTube videos consists of scrolling slowly through the 350+ colour settings so that users can copy and implement these themselves. Not a good look. However, Windows 11 now orchestrates the theme for apps, in addition for its own features. The user experience that is desired is that a Windows 11 user goes: Personalization >> Colors >> Choose your mode >> Dark [or, optionally, Choose your mode >> Custom >> Choose your default app mode = Dark] and this should have the effect of changing the main window colour scheme for Sierra Chart, including the main menu and control bars, and chartbook tabs/background. This does not necessarily need to override all of the graphics settings at and below the level of chartbooks, in your object hierarchy. In Excel, for example, support for dark mode is at the level of the main window, menu and control button bars, but does not extend down into the spreadsheet cells (unless the user selects an entirely different Contrast Theme, that is targeted at folks with forms of vision impairment.) I fully realize that this feature would be a significant investment for any software company. However, I'd suggest that it's past-time to bite the bullet. And while you're at it, you might want to update your fonts. Feel free to simply study and copy what Excel 2024 and Visual Studio 2022 are doing for both dark theme support and typeface selection for all of the menus. Likely, many of your users are also heavy Excel and/or Visual Studio users. Just ask ChatGPT and it will tell you the name of all of the fonts used. Please let us know whether you are able to commit to placing this feature on your 2025 Road-Map, in case it isn't already. Date Time Of Last Edit: 2024-12-14 14:56:02
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| [2024-12-14 19:10:05] |
| Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 18091 |
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There are misunderstandings here. First of all Windows 11 is nothing more than a demonic piece of woke trash. Fonts and colors are 100% controllable within Sierra Chart and you can set the colors anyway you want. You can see all of the total control of fonts throughout Sierra Chart that you have full control of, unlike anywhere else: Graphics Settings: Fonts and Text Appearance Probably what you are referring to is the title bar Sierra Chart which Windows 11 is not letting you control. This is nothing more than tyrannical woke damn insanity, from the lost retards at Microsoft who have evil intentions (we are being just too polite here). And we certainly are not going to do anything to create more reliance on Microsoft Woke trash. Windows 11 is a demonic piece of crap. And we hope this gets posted a billion+ times all over the Internet. Thank you. If you want to create a dark theme in Sierra Chart you have the ability now to do that. Sierra Chart is one of the few programs that let you do that. What are you unable to control the color of in Sierra Chart? and this should have the effect of changing the main window colour scheme for Sierra Chart, including the main menu and control bars, and chartbook tabs/background. In Global Settings >> Graphics Settings, you can change the color of Control Bars totally and completely. And Chartbook tabs. All of that is fully controllable by you. And you can control the main window background color. Refer to: Control Bar: Control Bar Colors Graphics Settings You cannot control menu colors. Unless we implement our own menus and maybe we should do that. But that's going to take some time. That would be the only thing we would consider. You need to understand, there is a race to destroy software and make it as bad as can be. This is consistent with all of the insanity of the world and we are not going to be part of this, demonic insanity going on. Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy: https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service: Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing Date Time Of Last Edit: 2024-12-14 19:11:21
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| [2024-12-14 20:03:31] |
| Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 18091 |
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One thing we looked at a few years ago, was having Sierra Chart draw the main window title bar because the color configuration of that is not controllable in newer versions of Windows. Unfortunately senior engineering, ourselves did not look into this, and we had one of our less senior developers look at this and it was communicated that there was issues and limitations with doing this and we did not investigate it further. The information found was that it is recommended that an application does not control that part of a window and we did not spend further time on it because we were quite busy with other things. We have now looked at this again, and looks reasonable for Sierra Chart to draw the title bar in border and make those colors controllable. So we will work on this. But the appearance is going to be nonstandard. You are not going to see, the typical, Minimize, Maximize, Close and System menu appearance. We will just replace those with letters like the following: Mn Mx Cl Sys These will just look like menu commands. This is one of the main things that users are asking about is the title bar and the borders of windows in Sierra Chart. Sierra Chart can draw all of this and take care of everything other than the menus. Implementing menus ourselves, is possible but it is a lot of work. Windows already does a good job of menus at least the menu functionality that Sierra Chart uses. And to replicate that is a lot of work on our part. Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy: https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service: Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing Date Time Of Last Edit: 2024-12-14 20:06:21
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| [2024-12-15 10:46:52] |
| Jedi Trader - Posts: 14 |
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As you explore your options for these features, here is the key Windows SDK doc for what we are discussing, including sample C++ code targeting Win32 apps such as yours. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/modernize/ui/apply-windows-themes#know-when-dark-mode-is-enabled |
| [2024-12-15 13:29:14] |
| seandunaway - Posts: 309 |
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we might be able to achieve this in acsil this sets the individual chart title bar to darkmode if it has the desired effect i'm sure we can use the winapi to search up the window hierarchy and get the main window's hwnd and set that too Date Time Of Last Edit: 2024-12-15 14:00:42
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 darkmode.gif / V - Attached On 2024-12-15 13:59:51 UTC - Size: 3.17 MB - 144 views  darkmode_64.dll - Attached On 2024-12-15 14:00:32 UTC - Size: 89.5 KB - 75 views darkmode_arm64.dll - Attached On 2024-12-15 14:00:35 UTC - Size: 78.5 KB - 61 views |
| [2024-12-15 13:32:25] |
| seandunaway - Posts: 309 |
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source attached if anyone wants to advance it you'll need to add -ldwmapi to LDLIBS Date Time Of Last Edit: 2024-12-15 13:34:12
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| darkmode.cpp - Attached On 2024-12-15 13:32:13 UTC - Size: 667 B - 64 views |
| [2024-12-15 15:10:35] |
| Rui S - Posts: 196 |
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this sets the individual chart title bar to darkmode
It would be great if the border lines / frame lines could be dark too. I don't have any problem with the title bars, as I just hide them. But in order to have dark border lines, I have to use third party "hacks", which changes some other programs in very strange ways. Just a note: I'm still and will stay on Windows 10, just because of this issue. |
| [2024-12-15 18:36:44] |
| seandunaway - Posts: 309 |
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we can set the border color with DWMWA_BORDER_COLOR while darkmode stuff is available since windows vista, it seems like the border color requires windows 11? does this work? Date Time Of Last Edit: 2024-12-15 19:40:46
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| darkmode_64.dll - Attached On 2024-12-15 18:36:37 UTC - Size: 90 KB - 68 views darkmode.cpp - Attached On 2024-12-15 19:40:43 UTC - Size: 1.18 KB - 59 views |
| [2024-12-15 19:29:33] |
| seandunaway - Posts: 309 |
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it might make more sense to just make it a standalone program once sierrachart is open just double click this and it should set every window to darkmode with black borders the problem is, the program has to be run after every sierrachart restart or new window detachments maybe someone could tidy it up into a task tray application that automatically reruns on sierrachart new window creation or on interval also, i can't figure out how the hell to get the hwnd of all the mdi attached child windows - any ideas? |
| sierrachart_darkmode.gif / V - Attached On 2024-12-15 19:29:09 UTC - Size: 2.15 MB - 109 views sierrachart_darkmode_x64.exe - Attached On 2024-12-15 19:29:15 UTC - Size: 94 KB - 44 views sierrachart_darkmode_a64.exe - Attached On 2024-12-15 19:29:22 UTC - Size: 83.5 KB - 28 views |
| [2024-12-15 19:31:06] |
| seandunaway - Posts: 309 |
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source attached
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| sierrachart_darkmode.c - Attached On 2024-12-15 19:30:49 UTC - Size: 1.22 KB - 34 views |
| [2024-12-15 22:20:10] |
| Jedi Trader - Posts: 14 |
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This is great work, seandunaway, in lighting the way (or should we say darkening the way?) forward for the development team at Sierra Chart. I think your interim, alpha solution, should serve as inspiration to that team. In their hands, obviously, a la MS Office and other modern applications, it would be great for the user's system-based theme-choice to extend from what you've done to deeper in the object hierarchy. If the user wants to toggle between a dark and light theme (depending, say, on the ambient lighting conditions in their environment), they almost certainly want these choices to cascade down from the application title bar through the main menu bar, the control bar, and the chart chrome, without needing to adjust or toggle 9 detailed settings or even to compose these into their own bottom-up graphics settings configuration packages. Bottom line: your immediate and energetic engagement with this initiative should underline to the engineers at Sierra Chart that the user base is really keen to see some movement on this feature-set. And they (and the product managers) can certainly take it as a compliment that folks are so committed to the Sierra Chart platform that they are investing in their own ad hoc solutions. Date Time Of Last Edit: 2024-12-15 22:50:12
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