Please restore the theme editor

[happen135]

I have been a user of the Cakewalk Sonar since 2004, and the new Sonar has brought about a new revolution with significant improvements and advancements. Thank you to Cakewalk! But the commonly used themes nowadays are either too black or too white. For me, an elderly person, the burden on my eyes has increased. I kindly request the R&D team to restore the theme editor from the CbB era, so that users can customize the colors that each window can adapt to. I don't know how much manpower, material resources, and financial resources are needed to implement this feature, but it is crucial. Please!

[Promidi]

CbB is bitmap based.  Sonar Free and Sonar Premium is vector based.

To implement a Theme editor for Sonar would require a complete rewrite .  

Maybe down the track, the adjustment of more colours can be made possible.  However, other than that, I do not see this as being a priority at this time.

[pedwal wally wally wha]

56 minutes ago, Promidi said:

To implement a Theme editor for Sonar would require a complete rewrite .

i wonder what the devs are using? just hard-coding the current schemes?

[happen135]

2 hours ago, Promidi said:

CbB is bitmap based.  Sonar Free and Sonar Premium is vector based.

To implement a Theme editor for Sonar would require a complete rewrite .  

Maybe down the track, the adjustment of more colours can be made possible.  However, other than that, I do not see this as being a priority at this time.

As a DAW user, I don't think I can understand what a bitmap is and what a vector is. The colors nowadays are too unfriendly, with white being too bright and black being too dark. Poor thing about my aging eyes

[User 905133]

40 minutes ago, happen135 said:

As a DAW user, I don't think I can understand what a bitmap is and what a vector is. The colors nowadays are too unfriendly, with white being too bright and black being too dark. Poor thing about my aging eyes

This is one of the few things I like about AI. Ask Google, "what is the difference between bitmap graphics and vector graphics." and even if it's not 100% accurate down to the very detailed level, you can get a relatively quick answer that often has a reasonable "close enough" answer for people without expert knowledge looking for the gist of an answer.

Here's the first paragraph I got:

Quote

Bitmap graphics, also known as raster graphics, are composed of a grid of pixels, each with a specific color, while vector graphics use mathematical equations to define lines, curves, and shapes. This fundamental difference leads to key distinctions in scalability, file size, and suitability for different types of images.  [from Google AI]

 

Edited Monday at 02:44 PM by User 905133
added a quote; fixed typos

[pedwal wally wally wha]

1 hour ago, happen135 said:

The colors nowadays are too unfriendly, with white being too bright and black being too dark.

looks great in a marketing image tho

[happen135]

10 hours ago, User 905133 said:

This is one of the few things I like about AI. Ask Google, "what is the difference between bitmap graphics and vector graphics." and even if it's not 100% accurate down to the very detailed level, you can get a relatively quick answer that often has a reasonable "close enough" answer for people without expert knowledge looking for the gist of an answer.

Here's the first paragraph I got:

 

Thank you for your reply. I am a user, not a developer. As for programming, it is the job of the development team. I am just making a suggestion to let Sonar consider the feelings of users and encourage more people to join the Sonar family

[happen135]

10 hours ago, pedwal wally wally wha said:

looks great in a marketing image tho

That's right, DAWs nowadays default to being completely black, which may be their main marketing strategy, but Cubase and others can be customized. We hope that Cake Walk can make adjustments to make it more user-friendly

[Canopus]

Considering that Microsoft always follows Apple design-wise, the recent presentation of Apple’s Liquid Glass, coming to all their platforms this autumn, will most likely mean that Microsoft soon will make similar changes to Windows. This leads me to believe that there is a GUI paradigm shift ahead, and that the current simplistic, flat look of so many DAWs and plugins will have to adapt, or otherwise soon look very dated.

Let’s hope that the architecture of Sonar’s vector-based design is flexible enough to meet the new modern.

[Colin Nicholls]

On 7/14/2025 at 9:54 PM, Canopus said:

Considering that Microsoft always follows Apple design-wise

Off topic, but I challenge your premise here. 

MSFT's Aero Glass was tried, and retired. Orders of magnitude advances in GPU power since then aren't going to change the fact that it is a bad idea.

[Canopus]

Orders of magnitude advances in GPU power since then, on all types of devices, might be the very reason why Apple makes these changes. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

[Starship Krupa]

On 7/14/2025 at 5:43 AM, pedwal wally wally wha said:

i wonder what the devs are using? just hard-coding the current schemes?

An extensive "theme editor" as CbB had will likely never come, and I don't have a problem with that. I leaned so hard into it because it was fun and the older button iconography rubbed me the wrong way. The buttons have been mostly fixed. I just want to be able to set colors. That's it. I don't need to design my own sets of buttons and controls.

I'm in the aging eyesight crew, finding Sonar to be less and less legible and finding myself going back to CbB or even SONAR for some operations.

As for how the devs are making their color themes, I suspect that there's a table that maps screen elements to color values. Put in a new color number and the corresponding screen element changes. For a dev to do it, they have to alter the code directly, which requires the administrative overhead of checking the module out, la la la.

It may be that they are going to come up with a dialog in the new style for color assignments, it seems unlikely that they would try to reuse the old custom color dialog. And a color picker dialog is surely lower priority than sexier dialogs that users will access more often, like the new Track Manager. Maybe it would be part of a whole facelift for Preferences.

The way to make it higher priority is to post right here in this forum, so well done to everyone who has.

IIRC, the earlier Theme Editor evolved from an in-house tool that may never have been intended for end users to get their hands on. Would explain the....idiosyncrasies of Theme Editor. It was a lot of fun, though, and I loved having that level of customization available. Themeing became a whole other hobby, and I suspect more people have used the themes I made with Theme Editor than have listened to my recordings....