It's time for UI update!

[Ethan Piliavin]

@Tommie-Hansen your design is beautiful. Do you have a variant with a toolbar?

Its a shame that the NPP developers don’t prioritize aesthetics, your design is the most beautiful by far.

[Joseph DeVore]

OOh PLEASE NO, the UI is PERFECT the way it is ;^_^;
I CANNOT STAND the Metro UI style of Windows 8+… :p

TRUE, if it ain’t broke don’t fix!

Changing the UI to Attracting new users :Rolls-Eyes: is dumb…
so its attract new at the expense of ALL those that already use NP++, that’s just sad

NP++ is G.R.E.A.T. because its NP++ and not necessarily like other programs
for example the program, CCleaner updated their UI to be more Metro like and it S.U.C.K.S. its got so much white space now its hard to look at and see the difference between different data areas and stuff… ie from v4=great to v5=WHITE-SPACE-HELL.

so for all those clambering for a NEW UI, PLEASE GO FIND ANOTHER PROGRAM TO USE that meet your needs!

[Tommie Hansen]

@Ethan-Piliavin said:

@Tommie-Hansen your design is beautiful. Do you have a variant with a toolbar?

Its a shame that the NPP developers don’t prioritize aesthetics, your design is the most beautiful by far.

Thank you,

It isn’t my design per se but rather a mashup of NPP, Spotify and the Atom.io editor. The window chrome is Spotify, the editor parts Atom.io and the menus/status-bar etc NPP.

But no, no sample with a toolbar. The toolbar would need a bit more tinkering but there are lots of UI icons out there that would probably fit so anyone actually fixing the current UI could just implement any of the already made libraries that exist. The mashup is basically how i would use it, but of course a darker UI variant should support all the things that come with the default install.

[Tommie Hansen]

@Joseph-DeVore said:

OOh PLEASE NO, the UI is PERFECT the way it is ;^_^;
I CANNOT STAND the Metro UI style of Windows 8+… :p

TRUE, if it ain’t broke don’t fix!

Changing the UI to Attracting new users :Rolls-Eyes: is dumb…

1. There’s no “Metro UI”; the mockup is a mashup of Spotify, Atom.io and NPP. None of these conform to what is commonly known as “Metro UI”.
2. A darker UI doesn’t mean that a brighter one cannot exist and be the default so that people that want to keep the “Windows 95”-style for whatever reason can do that. Just like it works now but with the addition to change the window chrome itself and having a default bright/dark theme.
3. I’ve used NPP since forever, no one has said anything about attracting new users. It’s about conforming to best practices within visual design; one simple photographic rule we can apply is that the brightest point within a frame (say an editor) automatically becomes the focal point. Thus having super-brights in less important areas isn’t such a great thing to say the least.
4. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” … ? Again – no one has said anything about forcing anyone to use a darker and more modern UI. It isn’t like you’re forced to install newer versions either if an option to use a darker UI would be too painful for you.

[Arno Welzel]

The general UI is mostly a matter of taste - but there are other details which really don’t work well:

Dialog windows don’t even follow plain standards - regardless which Windows version you use. For example:

• the “Find” window uses some kind of “toolbox” window decoration but also some weird “is sizeable” attribute even though you can’t resize the window anyway.

• many dialog windows don’t show a border in Windows 10: for example Preferences and Style Configuratior

• dialog style is not consistent in Windows 10: “Find” and “Preferences” use a white background while the shortcut mapper has a grey background with some custom style grey tabs which become white when active

At least Notepad++ should use a consistent GUI:

• use standard Windows controls whenever possible

• use regular Window style for dialog window title bars and borders and not “toolbox” style

• use one style for all dialogs and not “Win32 default window background” and “Win32 dialog background” mixed

[Andrés Zsögön]

Is someone seriously suggesting the Metro UI for a software with a layout from a typical Windows 95 OSR2 program??

Just open the Find dialog and you’ll see that it’s crowded with useless options that should not even be there to begin with. I’m not asking for a fancy Find toolbar, like any software from this century already has, just to use a more reasonable layout.

Settings such as the Window transparency (?) are still present in the Find dialog, in the Year of Our Lord 2017… and you expect the Metro GUI or Visual Studio 2015 themes on this program? Please don’t.

First things first… put someone to work on reorganizing the layout with standards from this decade, and then discuss trivial stuff such as tab colors or monochrome icons (soon to be discarded by Microsoft anyway).

[giri kotte]

It’s beyond the point now, I suppose. Atom and VS rule among the open sourced modern editors. VS is pretty fast. And if one’s comfortable with an occasional nag screen, Sublime is superior in every sense.
NP++ is the first thing that I install after a Windows installation and has been so for more than a decade. It had been a lifesaver for my Postgrad project but NP++ missed the bus when it comes to keeping up with the times, in GUI and cross-platform compatibility terms .
That said, even Vim and Emacs are unstoppable dinosaurs with thriving user communities. But I suspect most of their users tend to be tech savvy people working on Unix-like OSs.

[Ethan Piliavin]

@Tommie-Hansen what you have as “Old My Custom Style” is that something you already have setup for color scheme in NPP? Can you share this configuration?

[Tommie Hansen]

@giri-kotte said:

It’s beyond the point now, I suppose. Atom and VS rule among the open sourced modern editors. VS is pretty fast. And if one’s comfortable with an occasional nag screen, Sublime is superior in every sense.
NP++ is the first thing that I install after a Windows installation and has been so for more than a decade. It had been a lifesaver for my Postgrad project but NP++ missed the bus when it comes to keeping up with the times, in GUI and cross-platform compatibility terms .
That said, even Vim and Emacs are unstoppable dinosaurs with thriving user communities. But I suspect most of their users tend to be tech savvy people working on Unix-like OSs.

It’s sad though since NP++ pretty much smoke all these whenit comes to performance. There’s a reason both you and I install NP++ even though it might not be our daily driver for 'real’work nowadays. I just wished it actually was my daily driver since I hate wasting resources. Any machine should be able to launch a code editor and run it well. NP++ can be ran on anything with good performance, the others? Not so much.

[Tommie Hansen]

@Ethan-Piliavin Gladly, but only if you tell me how?

My guess is that i need to export my entire config-dir or something since it’s not only stuff within Style configuration but stuff within the settings as well which means i’ll have to share my entire config dir or something. :)

[Tommie Hansen]

@milipili said (2 years ago):

A skinnable UI is planned (I want a dark theme too) but a few things remain to do before.

What happend?

[Seth Ryan DeSantis]

N++ is already good, but this would really be a greatly appreciated feature, but depending on how the codebase is setup it might require a lot of work to implement.

I guess we can implement it ourselves considering SC is available.

[appar1tion]

i vote against any UI changes. win10’s flat style killed any distinction between tabs and UI elements. it’s much more difficult to navigate even simple menus in win10 because everything bleeds together. the current notepad++ ui style is a major reason as to why i use it.

[ArkadiuszMichalski]

@appar1tion Finally a rational voice, all this flat/metro/modern style is one big smudge, everything bleeds together, this is rather a retrogression in UI design rather than progress. Making news only for the news itself is a bad direction.

[Ricardo Malikoski]

I vote to change UI.

[Victor Massé]

A more eye-candy UI would be the the cherry on the cake.
I suggest something very simple, as the Atom gui, with some material design.

Has there been some revamping scheduled since this 2 year old subject has been opened ?

[hoppfrosch1]

I vote against changing UI - at least against changing to flat/metro/modern style due to the reasons given above by other users

[Ergün Yildiz]

I vote on yes.

You all think that refine the UI will make NPP slower or something. Update or refine or name it whatever you want does not mean rewrite npp from scratch. We only want to make changes to the UI to make it feel better.

We all love the lightweight ot NPP no argue there and I’m sure if the developers start coding UI they will always make sure that it stays that way. but we all have eyes and personally I like to feel more modern (not necessarily material or metro) when I’m using NPP.

I also agree on optional UI change. This might be the best solution for both. But I’ll never understand people who fear change.

[linpengcheng]

npp UI is the best, beautiful, fast!
the UI of sublime, atom , vscode,emacs,vim is bad!

[Mikhail V]

Just some thoughts.
I think such exclamations as “let’s change the UI :-D” goes nowhere.
Why just not make some concrete point about UI?

All the more, do you realize that you cannot just change the UI,
since this application, I assume, uses a framework or invoke native elements,
therefore you must either:
a) rewrite the whole UI engine so it does not rely on those, or:
b) use other framework (or manipulate the current framework somehow)

The issue (from some above screenshots) is that by dark theme you
still have light borders? Well it is not so nice, I agree. But that is
by many apps I have used exactly the same issue.
So there should be a way to change the face color of UI elements globally and
not only the window contents. but it could easily mean radical refactoring
of the softare (= a lot of work).
OTOH, I will not understand in all my life why would one want to use
a dark theme anyway.