Settings menu is unreadable when theme changes in the evening with default MacOS configuration

[jneen]

Bug Description

When the system theme changes in the evening, some styles seem to be updated and others don't, resulting in unreadable text in all preferences menus.

Lots of the text is near-white on light-grey.

I have not set any custom QT themes, this is a bare install with default settings.

Version

Mixxx 2.4.1 on MacOS - 2021 M1 Max running Sonoma 14.6.1, installed with homebrew cask.

OS

No response

[ronso0]

Nope, all dialogs use the Qt / system theme.
(We considered styling the preferences per skin, but dismissed/delayed that because it's a ton of work to do it right)
Do all pref pages look like this?

How do the pages look like when you set the bright OS theme?

[ronso0]

and which macOS and Mixxx version do you use?

[jneen]

Looks like it's fixed on restart. M1 Max, Sonoma 14.6.1, iirc the latest. I think the issue likely happens when the system theme changes during runtime. And yeah all the preferences pages looked like that.

[jneen]

Yeah okay, confirmed - I can reproduce it by opening Mixxx and then swapping the system theme from System Preferences between light/dark.

[ronso0]

Okay, thanks for checking.

Is the theme updated in other apps' settings/dialogs?
If, yes I'm not sure if/how this can be fixed.
@fwcd what do you think?

[fwcd]

If restarting Mixxx fixes it, it's probably just an unintended consequence of assuming that the theme doesn't change while the app is running (IIRC we do that for localization and a few other things too, probably out of convenience).

I agree that the interaction with automatic theme changes is unfortunate. I'm not familiar enough with our styling to say how much of this Qt is responsible for and how much we are, but my gut feeling is that it's probably something on Qt's side, so maybe worth searching for relevant issues there.

Is the theme updated in other apps' settings/dialogs?

Yes, most apps I've encountered on macOS handle "hot" color scheme changes correctly (almost all Cocoa apps, Firefox, VSCode, GTK4 apps).