Switch off dark mode in 6.0?

ParaView Support
1

I just installed 6.0 on PC and found that it has defaulted to a ‘dark mode’ UI, and I really want to switch back to the light mode that I had in version 5.x. I cannot find a way to do this in the settings, how can I get light mode back?

2

Just curious - is your window system in dark mode? Which OS are you on?

3

Windows 10, dark mode. Paraview 5.x doesn’t default to dark mode though.

4

You can keep windows in Dark mode and change all your “apps” in light mode if thats helps:

image

This is not ideal though, a more fine grained control would be nice.

5

Thanks, I tried that and it changes way too many parts of windows back to light mode. For the time being I’ve managed to get it to override the stylesheet somewhat with a .bat file and qss file so that at least it’s light in colour, though the buttons sizes get a bit messed up. If it’s possible to request features then I’d love a dark/light theme toggle!

6

I had the similar issue (on Windows 11 Dark mode). ParaView 6.0 inherits that from the system settings. I tried to use it in Dark mode, but I for one found it, unfortunately, unusable. I uninstalled it immediately and installed 5.13.2.

I am not a big fan of workarounds for a basic setting like that. I hope this gets fixed in the next release so users can choose between the light and dark mode.

7

Can you share how you did it? That would be great!

8

No problem. I put this in a .bat file (paraview_light.bat) in the Paraview bin folder:

@echo off
setlocal
set "APPDIR=%~dp0"
set "EXE=%APPDIR%paraview.exe"
set "QSS=%APPDIR%light.qss"

REM Force a light Qt style; stylesheet makes it lighter.
set "QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=Fusion"

REM Launch ParaView with the stylesheet from the same folder
"%EXE%" -style Fusion -stylesheet "%QSS%" %*
endlocal

The Fusion stylesheet was the first attempt, which wasn’t successful, so that line can probably be removed. I added a style sheet in the same bin folder (light.qss). I don’t know much about style sheets unfortunately, so this is mostly the work of AI. I imagine that it took a pretty wild stab in the dark and has probably tried to apply styles to things that don’t even exist in the Paraview UI, but it worked well enough that I was at least able to use 6.0:

/* Very light, neutral UI */
QWidget { background: #f6f6f6; color: #111; }
QMenuBar, QMenu, QToolBar, QStatusBar, QDockWidget { background: #efefef; color: #111; }
QToolTip { background: #ffffdc; color: #111; border: 1px solid #c0c0c0; }

/* Editors, views */
QLineEdit, QTextEdit, QPlainTextEdit,
QListView, QTreeView, QTableView {
  background: #ffffff; color: #111; selection-background-color: #cde7ff; selection-color: #111;
}

/* Headers */
QHeaderView::section {
  background: #e9e9e9; color: #111; padding: 3px; border: 1px solid #d0d0d0;
}

/* Buttons & controls */
QPushButton, QToolButton, QComboBox, QSpinBox, QDoubleSpinBox {
  background: #f9f9f9; color: #111; border: 1px solid #cfcfcf; padding: 4px 6px;
}
QPushButton:hover, QToolButton:hover, QComboBox:hover {
  background: #ffffff;
}
QPushButton:pressed, QToolButton:pressed {
  background: #e6e6e6;
}

/* Tabs */
QTabBar::tab {
  background: #eaeaea; color: #111; padding: 6px 10px; border: 1px solid #d0d0d0;
}
QTabBar::tab:selected { background: #ffffff; }

/* Splitters */
QSplitter::handle { background: #dddddd; }

/* Checkboxes / radios */
QCheckBox, QRadioButton { background: transparent; color: #111; }

/* Scrollbars (simple light) */
QScrollBar:vertical, QScrollBar:horizontal {
  background: #f0f0f0; border: 1px solid #d0d0d0;
}
QScrollBar::handle:vertical, QScrollBar::handle:horizontal {
  background: #cfcfcf; min-height: 20px; min-width: 20px;
}

/* --- Toolbar icon sizing --- */
/* Main window toolbars (keep these a bit larger) */
QMainWindow > QToolBar { qproperty-iconSize: 18px; }

/* Render-view toolbars INSIDE the VTK widget (make these smaller) */
/* Cover common widget class names across ParaView builds */
QVTKOpenGLNativeWidget QToolBar,
QVTKOpenGLWidget QToolBar,
pqQVTKWidget QToolBar {
  qproperty-iconSize: 14px;
}
/* Tighten padding on those smaller buttons */
QVTKOpenGLNativeWidget QToolBar QToolButton,
QVTKOpenGLWidget QToolBar QToolButton,
pqQVTKWidget QToolBar QToolButton {
  padding: 2px;
}

/* (Optional) smaller dock titlebar buttons */
QDockWidget::close-button, QDockWidget::float-button { icon-size: 10px; }
9

Thanks for sharing, I’ll try it out.