UI theme support now core in QGIS

I enjoy using the dark UI theme for QGIS so much I figured why not make it a core feature. In the next version of QGIS if you head to the options screen you can now find a UI Theme option.

The default dark theme is called Night Mapping for all those late night mapping jobs that you do, or if you just like dark UI themes.

Something you will notice with this theme is the custom icons for the layer visibility. Pretty nifty! Here is how it is done

Creating new themes

To create a new theme simply make a new folder in .qgis2\themes\ with the name of the theme you want and create a style.qss file inside there. Check out the default themes for an example

Follow the Qt style sheet guides to see what can be styled.

Something I have added on top of the normal style sheets is variable support. Variables can be declared in a variables.qss file in the theme folder.

Here is an example of some variables:

@background: #323232
@text: #aaa
@selection: #507098
@menuback: #444
@highlight: #ffaa00

Now in style.qss we can do this:

QWidget
{
color: @text;
background-color: @background;
}

Great for not having to repeat your self or quick updating in a single place. When the theme is applied via the Options dialog or via the API it will replace the variables in style.qss using variables.qss. The result file is called style.qss.auto

Needs some tweaks

The default dark theme is a collection of stuff I have found around the net and stuff I have added myself. It’s far from prefect and I would love help to make it the best dark theme for QGIS. If you have another theme you think would make a good default one open a pull request on GitHub

Enjoy