Why?

[S_M]

Didn't see a "suggestions" or "share your experience" part in the forums for Plastic SCM, so i thought i could share a thought of mine about it here.

I love Plastic in general, but have one specific thing i don't like in the new version.

The GUI.

Probably one of the most important things to choose Plastic instead of another SCM is its great visual presentation but why have you gone down the road of that fail metro style minimalistic UI?

Why lose the color?

Are people using Plastic from their phones, so you want to look like software written for a phone?

It makes reading the UI much worse than when there is more color.

Could someone say what is the reason behind the idea to dumb down and worsen the visual look of the GUI?
It starts to look like the same horrific UI Visual Studio 2012, when developers were totally disgusted with it. MS listened (to an extend) and improved the GUI in 2013 and at least they give a theme editor where you could change a lot of things.

I can't understand why you have (at least for me) made the UI worse?

Any plans to bring back more color or give a tool to enhance it?

The way it is now i really dislike the monochrom-ish and minimalistic style.

It's a tool for developers, i use it mainly on a machine with SLI gfx card setup, do you think i lack the resources to show some color?

In all the great progress Plastic makes all the time (congratulations and thanks for which), this regress really surprised me unpleasantly.

I hope the UI gets back to more color soon or at least give an option to select more coloful setup.

What are your thoughts?

Thank you.

[calbzam]

Hi,

 

We have modified some icons, and colors, but the change Plastic 4 --> Plastic 5 hasn´t been so big ^^

 

What´s the previous version you were using?

 

If you open a command line and type "plastic --theme=I3", you can use a dark theme (but not sure if this is what you are looking for).

 

In the Plastic 5 installation folder, you will find a "theme" folder.  You can customize the icons and you can even find a configuration file where you can configure the GUI colors. In summary, we offer our users the possibility of a more customizable GUI if you don´t like the default icons and colors.

 

Best regards,

Carlos

[S_M]

Hi,

I used version 4 of plastic, before that, not sure which one exactly but for sure Plastic 4 and i find the change quite big

I like the original theme and the only problem is the monochromatic icons.

It's good to know there is a way to customize the icons i will look into it.

Is there a way to get the old, Plastic 4 icons (without installing plastic 4), at least for the gui buttons and substitute the ones in 5 with the old ones?

Thank you.

[calbzam]

Hi,

 

@Jakubh, in this post:  http://www.plasticscm.net/index.php?/topic/2018-plastic-5-evaluating-custom-icons-etc/?hl=icons  

 

posted a different version of the icons. I think you will like them.

 

Regards,

Carlos

[S_M]

I will look into them.

Thank you.

[JakubH]

I don't favor the monochromatic look and feel too, but I can live with that. What I have been more considered about was the clarity and consistency of the icons. The icon set of Plastic 4 has its own issues in readability and consistency but the new icons didn't help much.

I haven't redrawn all the icons but only several ones, which were IMHO inconsistent or hard to understand. I used overlay icons from the Plastic 4 (with a color modification for a changed item) because I like them more than the new ones.