Design has been one of the major focus points of LibreOffice in the last few years, and the Design community has produced new icon sets, new MIME type icons, a hugely improved dark mode, and improvements to the NotebookBar (This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2023 – we’ll post the full […]
Why an application and not the UI framework has to care for dark mode?
LibreOffice uses its own widget toolkit. It works similarly to wxWidgets, basically just maps to whatever toolkit is native on the current platform. It uses Win32 on Windows, Cocoa on macOS, Qt on KDE, GTK on GNOME and a few others.
That said, their current approach to dark themes is pretty bad. It can very easily conflict with the dark theme from the host toolkit and cause issues if misconfigured, which has caused a lot of people to think it just doesn’t work. It does work, but it can be confusing as hell to configure correctly.
For instance, LibreOffice has a setting you can use to change the application colors. It barely works and you should never touch it. Just let it get the colors from your toolkit.
There’s also the fact that LibreOffice doesn’t use FDO icons and has its own icon setting which doesn’t automatically follow dark/light theme. If you’re using a dark theme, you have to manually switch the icon set to one that isn’t impossible to see on a dark background.
Oh and if you want your documents to use a dark palette that’s also a separate setting. Like I said, confusing.
Thanks for the view behind the curtains!
And yeah, dark in the document is another pain point, especially in IDE’s/editors and if you switch between dark and light for day/night. They should just all have color/icon settings for dark/light separately.
What is FDO icons?
FDO stands for FreeDesktop.Org, the committee responsible for various desktop Linux standards including icon themes. So FDO icons just refers to your system icon theme, which LibreOffice doesn’t use.