Raspberry Pi OS’ dark mode adds more coal to your stocking this year
Your grumpy adopted teenage chimpanzee Raspberry Pi son hates you and spends day and night in his room playing online video games with weirdos who he claims “get” him.
Yeah, haha, dark modes are for emos, The register has already been there, but I (we?) think it's… good to give your Raspberry Pi 5 a theme that won't burn your eyes off, like you can do now? Provocative.
Dark mode on a Pi has been viable for a while now, but it's worth getting the latest image of RPi OS (a patch for October's Debian-based Bookworm release) because it turns this essential feature into a simple toggle so you can use the arcane and black command-line art for whatever annoying niche use you bought it for.
Obey the Dark Lord (Pi).
In fact, this is such a basic feature that any software developer who doesn't include it in their Pi distribution at launch should be sent to The Hague, but according to Senior Principal Software Engineer Simon Long in a blog post In that regard, it took the urging of Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi, to build the business further.
“A few weeks ago, Eben walked by my desk and said, “Wouldn't it be nice if we had a dark theme?”' Long writes.
This was followed by manual tweaks to RPi OS's PiXflat theme: the reason for the wait, as he tells it, is because colors in PiXflat are hardcoded, rather than variables. Hindsight is 20-20, which you won't have because the 3am light mode has made you blind.
“(…) it all interacts, so you find that if you adjust one color, you then have to adjust four or five other colors to keep the contrast correct,” he continues, describing what, to be honest , sounds like a pain to address.
However, “'there are a few uses, — Thonny (a popular one Python IDE) is one —,” he warns, “that doesn't use a theme and so can't achieve a dark look, but pretty much all of our other default applications will be themed as intended.”
But just in case you're thinking, “If there's one app that needs a dark mode feature, it's a damn, hour-long Python interpreter,” well, user “Kris” writes the line below: “Thonny has also dark themes: Tools -> Options -> Themes and fonts.' So some application developers will have to do extra work, but some have already done that.
The rest of this update is dedicated to features: “improved connections in WayVMC” and Thonny, Mathematica and Scratch 3 are all updated to work on the Pi 5. Plus more byzantine release notes than you can, um – bake into a cake?