Theme Browser

It’s great that you can theme renoise but would be even better if you could see a preview of a theme that you were about to apply.

I’m thinking of something like:

Themes are shown in a list, as each one is clicked on either a theme preview box shows what that theme will look like or the renoise theme actually changes. Hitting cancel would cancel any changes.

That’d be helpful indeed.

It could work in a similar way to the sample browser - that doesn’t open a separate file browser window and the sound can be ‘previewed’ just by clicking on it.

What´s the difference compared to present then? Just double click the themes and try em out until you find one you like. I see absolutely no value in previewing them in some other way. It’s not like it takes long time to load themes?..

The main issue is that you have to go to the file browser to load files. This means that you can’t quickly and sequentially go through a list of theme files as every time the file browser is closed your place is effectively lost and requires you to recall the name of theme you just loaded to resume from that point when browsing for a theme to use. This is even harder if your themes are grouped in sub-directories as the theme browser always starts at the root theme directory. Relying on recall memory is bad usability practice.

This process would be much simpler if a built-in browser was used and themes were load on click/double-click.

I agree that he current theme browsing is functional, but it is cumbersome and can certainly be improved. This could potentially be a quick fix too as the built-in file browser component could be re-used, if indeed the software has been built that way.

If you’re on windows, open the file explorer and simply drag&drop the theme files on renoise. My guess is this works on other OSs too. (I wonder how often users change themes. Personally I tried a few, made my own, and settled on it.)

Great tip! This method does make it easy to preview a large number of themes in one go - thanks!

Even better, I have just discovered that you can already do exactly as I suggested above!

Select ‘Theme’ in the directory selector and then double click away on themes, magic!

I think this is a great yet simple idea. It’d save me the greif of having to save my theme every time I want to browse others. Not that I do it all too often. But yaknow.