One of the best parts about Back SEO is the fact that you can change the theme of your application. Having this kind of control allows you to change your theme to fit more with your brand, or focus better. Personally, I can’t stand light themes, and choose dark mode in every application that I can. If I wasn’t in the web development field, I would force dark mode on every website.
Why does changing X color not change anything?
There are a lot of different items in the configure theme list that aren’t visible on every screen in Back SEO, so you might think that it’s broken. Some of the things on the theme editor aren’t in the application at all. For example, currently there’s no plot histograms in the application. The engine that Back SEO uses is called DearPyGUI (a wrapper for Dear IMGUI, a C++ library for GUIs that run on GPU).
A little background on back sEO GUI Development
99% of people are probably going to skip this section, because it’s technical and boring and no one cares about development, but, I digress, Back SEO is built for developers and webmasters. If you don’t care about this section, skip it and go down to the Editing Theme section.
Running on the GPU allows the app to process things a lot faster than running on the CPU, for example, resizing. When you resize an application, all of the items need to move or change size. If you use absolute positioning, where items don’t move, it’s not that bad. But at that point you might as well lock the size of the application. When you use relative positioning then changing size means that every visible (and non-visible) object will have to move in order to fit within the new size constraints.
When you have a relatively basic application, this isn’t that bad. However, for Back SEO, since we create a lot of buttons when we are doing searches (Suggested Headers and Common Keywords), a lot of objects get created at once, and they all have to move and change positions whenever the child windows get resized. The last GUI engine that I used was CPU bound, rather than GPU. Performing searches wasn’t nearly as fast because it had to render all of the common keywords one by one. This was not acceptable, so I switched GUIs.
default theme
The default theme for Back SEO is a red and black with white text. It is created whenever the application starts up for the first time or whenever the app can’t find “/themes/default.ini”. If it can find “/themes/default.ini”, then that is the theme that is going to be loaded on startup. So if you want to change the default theme, instead of having to switch up your theme every time, save it as default.ini. Don’t be afraid to mess up the default INI, you can always delete it and reboot the app, the default theme is hard coded into the application.
*The application will detect and create the folders needed for running every single time you start up. If your website audit folder or search folder is getting too big, don’t be afraid to zip it up or move it to a new location. Back SEO will create the folder again and you can start fresh!
Saving Themes
After you have configured your theme to the way that you like it, you can save it as whatever you’d like. You can have as many themes as you’d like, and change them as many times as you want to.
Loading Themes
If you don’t like the way your theme is turning out, or you want to test out a theme someone shared with you, you can use the load theme window. When you load a theme, the configure theme window will close. In fact, the whole configure theme window gets destroyed, rebuilt, then hidden again. This is done so that the next time you open the configure theme menu, the colors will be updated.
Configuring themes
Finally, the part you’ve all been wanting to read about. Configuring the theme looks pretty daunting at first, but once you know what everything does, it gets a lot easier.
At the top of the configure theme menu, there’s the close button and Save Theme/Load Theme. These buttons are self explanatory.
Then we’ve got all the different items and their current color value. You can see in the grid all of their different RGBA values (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha). When you click on the color, a new window shows up, as you can see in the picture.
- The big color box is the shade of the color. In the example, you can see that it’s red, and you can pick the exact shade that you want, including 100% black or 100% white.
- To the right of that (vertical colorful bar) we have the color selector. Click on the kind color you want, then the shade selector will reflect that color.
- To the right of that, we have the alpha bar. If you want a certain item to be more see through, you can change the alpha value in order to make that happen.
- Then we’ve got the display of the original color and the current color to the right of that. Pretty self explanatory.
- Underneath, we have the RGBA values. You can edit the values here or directly on the configure items menu.
- Below that, we have the HSVA boxes. HSVA stands for Hue, Saturation, Value, Alpha. If modifying colors using HSV is your thing, these boxes are for you.
- And finally, at the bottom, there’s the Hex value. Editing the hex value is much easier than using anything else if you are trying to go for a specific theme, since there’s only 1 value to change, rather than 4.
Important theme items
All of the important theme items are located closer to the top of the configure theme menu. As you can see, the order of the items has changed, because making a chart pointing to where all of the different important items were would be a huge pain in the butt. So, the items are now grouped together by what they are. Text->Tabs->Buttons->Windows->Titles->Menus->Scrollbar.
As you can see, I also made a completely new theme that looks pretty cool. If you’d like to download this theme, go check it out in the themes menu. It’s called bluegreen.
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