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Native Light/Dark editor themes on Scintilla 3.7.6 #6

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Native Light/Dark editor themes on Scintilla 3.7.6#6

Description

@itlezy
itlezy
opened on Nov 9, 2026

Implement native Light/Dark editor themes on the current Scintilla 3.7.6 baseline, preserving the small-maintenance fork approach.

The existing style renderer already controls text/background, margins, selection, caret, braces, current line, whitespace and folding. The existing Shift+F12 toggle switches only default styles; language token palettes remain shared. A complete theme must cover both.

Product direction:

  • Stay close to Notepad2-mod, preserving fast startup, responsive editing, small footprint, native controls and simple deployment.
  • Minimal, focused evolution. No migration to Notepad3/Notepad4 or adoption of their theme frameworks or feature stacks.
  • Use the existing native schemes/configuration and Scintilla 3.7.6. Avoid new dependencies and background work. Version or feature parity is not a goal.
  • Keep theme switching out of the per-character editing path. Assess affected startup, editing latency, memory and idle work against the current fork, recording measurements and limitations where relevant.

Acceptance criteria:

  • Switch between complete Light and Dark palettes across supported languages without changing the selected language, font preferences, file associations, document contents, selection or undo history.
  • Persist the selected theme. Repeated switches and restart produce predictable results.
  • Keep bookmarks and occurrence highlights readable; inventory remaining popup/editor colors outside Styles.c.
  • Invalid or partial theme input must not leave a mixed live palette.
  • Validate Release/Debug x86/x64, representative lexer samples, selection/brace/highlight readability and restart persistence.

Scope is editor-only: text/background, syntax colors, margins, selection, caret, braces, current line, whitespace, folding, bookmarks and occurrence highlights. Application chrome (menus, dialogs, toolbar, status bar, title bar and scrollbars) is out of scope, not a planned follow-up. Completing editor themes completes this appearance milestone.

Reference investigation (source inspection only, no imported or runtime-tested code):

  • None of the five candidate backlog forks (antiufo, johnwait, mercury233, tnotstar, waskosky) showed dark-mode hooks or a dedicated dark implementation in the checked default-branch application paths. This is not an exhaustive audit of every historical branch.
  • An older native INI palette exists at https://github.com/achbed/notepad2-colors-solarized . Its README says Light/second-default Dark using Shift+F12, with only Default Text, Web Source Code, CSS and JavaScript covered. Treat as palette reference, not a complete theme or whole-app dark mode.

Notepad++ XML import is out of scope unless a later review demonstrates a concrete benefit. Do not upgrade Scintilla for this feature.

Activity

  1. itlezy commented on Nov 9, 2026

    @itlezy
    itlezy
    on Nov 9, 2026
    OwnerAuthor

    Implemented locally on branch chore/build-and-repo-policy in four granular commits (not pushed):

    • 509a743: Original/Dark editor palettes, menu, independent color persistence, shared non-color preferences, highlight colors.
    • 863b19e: safe defaults, Original preservation and native integration checks.
    • cdedc14: active-theme Reset plus real customization dialog coverage.
    • 4b3a555: usage and validation documentation.

    Validation:

    • Release/Debug x86/x64 builds passed.
    • Native integration suite passed on all four binaries: 38 schemes, 40 repeated switches, custom Original preservation, shared fonts, selection/viewport/undo availability, restart persistence, disabled settings saving, unknown selection and malformed saved default fallback, real Preview/Cancel/OK/Reset, second-default compatibility.
    • Seven-run x64 small-file measurement: median startup 71.84 ms baseline / 73.06 ms Original / 71.69 ms Dark; private memory 3204 / 3440 / 3440 KiB; 100 numeric delete/undo pairs 30.19 / 31.20 / 29.56 ms; sampled idle CPU deltas zero over 200 ms. Indicative local measurements, not large-file or general typing-performance proof.
    • Staged checks pass; working tree clean. Scintilla remains 3.7.6, with no new vendor patches, dependencies or background work.

    Boundaries: application chrome out of scope; no external theme loading or system-theme sync. Native autocomplete appearance and the existing bookmark pixmap are unchanged; background bookmark highlights and occurrences use theme colors. Full visual contrast review, large-file performance and manual legacy import/export dialog workflows are not claimed as tested here. Keep this issue open until the local work is reviewed/published.

  2. itlezy commented on Nov 9, 2026

    @itlezy
    itlezy
    on Nov 9, 2026
    OwnerAuthor

    First prerelease published: https://github.com/itlezy/notepad2-mod/releases/tag/v4.2.25.1029-rc.1

    • Merged PR Maintain Notepad2-mod with native editor themes and portable releases #7 with granular history preserved, followed by test-harness CI hardening in PR Allow bounded native startup time on hosted Windows runners #8.
    • Master and tag CI passed Release/Debug x86/x64, including native theme/customization/persistence tests across all 38 schemes.
    • Release publishing automatically assembled a draft, verified both portable ZIPs and SHA256SUMS.txt, and published it as a prerelease.
    • Downloaded the public x86/x64 ZIPs, verified archive checksums, source commit/version/architecture metadata and executable hashes, then ran the full native theme integration suite against both downloaded executables successfully.
    • Published binaries are unsigned. No changes were made to the installed system-wide executable, image redirection, file associations or existing user settings during CI setup.

    Future releases: merge green changes to master, derive the four-part executable version, and push v (stable) or v-rc.N (prerelease). Details are in Readme.md.

  3. itlezy commented on Nov 9, 2026

    @itlezy
    itlezy
    on Nov 9, 2026
    OwnerAuthor

    Published the focused follow-up as https://github.com/itlezy/notepad2-mod/releases/tag/v4.2.25.1040-rc.1 (merged PR #13).

    Hosted CI passed Release/Debug x86/x64 using pytest and pywinauto. Downloaded both public archives, verified SHA256 checksums, source/version metadata and executable hashes, then ran all 94 tests against each downloaded binary successfully.

    The release includes the save-prompt and MRU fixes, deterministic source charset, flag-aware elevated visibility, and the requested line copy/cut/paste shortcuts. The standard-user UAC interaction check remains manual in #12. System-wide installed executable and associations were not updated by this release task.

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