Paint.net needs a dark theme.

valuetube · October 1, 2015

Ok i've been useing paint.net for the past at least 6 to 7 years, and I just the past year I been having the biggest gripe with it. IT NEEDS A DARK THEME. It would help so much if I could get my hands on one, I've tried to shearch around for somthing but been coming up short. I did read somwhere that it's not even possible to edit the program to achive this. I absolutly love doing all my projects in paint.net, but the constant starring at the screen for long persiods of times burn my eyes at times and when Im working on darker images, my eyes are trying to adjest to both the brightness of the boarders and a dark image I'm working on that has a lot of details. For the love thats great, plaease add a dark theme to the program.

Ego Eram Reputo · October 1, 2015

There are two themes, Blue and Light (as far as I recall). Find these in :Settings: Settings > User Interface > Color Scheme

The issue with a dark theme is that many of the control won't play nicely with it. Rick has commented on this before.

If the default schemes don't suit you, your best bet is to tweak your Windows theme.

MJW · October 2, 2015

valuetube, please give your threads better names. Perhaps something like "Request for dark theme" for this one. "Need some info" tells us nothing.

Rick Brewster · October 2, 2015

If paint.net were written in WPF or a custom UI framework, this would be fairly straightforward. But it uses WinForms, and a black background just doesn't end up working well. Some controls work fine, others are stubborn and just don't work. Black text on black background, that kind of stuff.

Your best bet is to use a High Contrast theme from the Personalization control panel. Paint.NET does respect the coloring from those. The downside is that it affects the whole system.