I have a custom colortheme (based on the dark-theme).
After upgrading Ardour I have to copy my custom theme-file to the new-version (/share/themes/) directory.
That’s ok.
But the new Ardour-version can’t handle this custom-theme too well it seems. I’ve experienced this several times with different Ardour version upgrades. The outcome is different every time.
The newest one, 8.4, is pretty colourful indeed, and regions are invisible. See picture.
If I select a different colourtheme and then immediate select my custom theme again things are back to normal. So Ardour can’t interpret my customtheme at startup but it can if I selecet it at preferences.
Is it a bug or just that themefiles are constructed different with each new version of Ardour?
Random colors indicate a missing color definition in your theme file (there should be a “missing” or “undefined” color message in the logs). When working with a custom theme, one should keep an eye on changes upstream and update it accordingly.
See History for gtk2_ardour/themes/dark-ardour.colors - Ardour/ardour · GitHub
The issue you encounter is most probably due to these recent additions: UI tweaks by jean-emmanuel · Pull Request #862 · Ardour/ardour · GitHub
Thanks Jean-Emmanuel.
I do now understand a little bit the implications of making and keeping up-to-date a personal theme-file. I implemented some of the recent changes and indeed some colors are normal now. But not all, still lots of errors in the logs so I probably missed the changes in previous updates.
I’d better stick with the the official theme and make a list of all my personal preferences.
It’s not that much so making these changes to the preferences after every Ardour update isn’t a big deal.