[Feature Requests] Improve Theming Experience & window behavior

[schmurtzm]

Feature Requests to Improve Ditto’s Usability and Theming Experience

Hello,

First of all, thank you for your amazing work on Ditto. I’ve been a huge fan for years, and I truly appreciate how much this tool improves my daily workflow.
Here are a few suggestions that I believe could enhance the user experience even further — I’m sure some of them could also benefit the wider community.

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1. Easier and More Interactive Theme Selection

Choosing a theme is currently a bit tedious:
Right-click → Options → select a theme → OK → check the result → repeat for the next theme…

The biggest frustration is that Ditto is already capable of applying theme changes live (editing the XML theme file instantly updates the UI).

Proposed improvement: “Preview Theme” button

• Add a Preview button next to the theme dropdown.
• When clicking Preview, Ditto opens a preview window showing the UI using the currently selected theme.
• Changing the theme in the dropdown while the preview window is open would immediately update the preview window live.

This would make theme selection far more intuitive and user-friendly.

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2. Additional window behavior options (in Advanced Options)

These small behavioral tweaks would allow users to tailor Ditto’s ergonomics to their workflow:

a. Option: Allow Ditto to stay visible when losing focus

“keep displaying the window when it's in the background”
Useful for workflows where the user wants to navigate with mouse between Ditto and another app without disappearing automatically.

b. Option: Do not hide Ditto after pasting

The goal is to allow multiple pastes without re-opening Ditto every time.
Example workflow:

1. I'm in Notepad
2. I open Ditto
3. I double-click an entry → it pastes
4. Without reopening Ditto, I move my cursor elsewhere in notepad, go back to ditto window just by moving my mouse and double-click another entry

This enables very fast alternating pastes.

c. Option: Hide taskbar icon when closing Ditto window

(When “Show in taskbar” is enabled firstly.)
Closing Ditto with the “X” button or the Escape key would hide the taskbar icon. scenario :

1. Keyboard shortcut to display Ditto.
2. Perform multiple pastes, alternating between two windows using Alt + Tab.
3. When I'm done, I press Escape to hide Ditto.
4. Ditto’s window disappears entirely, including its taskbar icon (when the option “Show in taskbar” is enabled).

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3. Visual Refinement: Modern Scrollbar

The current scrollbar looks quite old-school compared to the modern theming system.
It would be great if the scrollbar could:

• adopt the theme’s color palette
• have a more modern / flat visual style

This small change would improve visual consistency.

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I hope these suggestions can help make it even better.
I’d be happy to provide more examples or mockups if needed!

[Chealer]

Greetings @schmurtzm

Thank you for this, but please indicate at least 1 affected version and try keeping different issues tracked in different tickets, unless:

1. there is a strong relation between them which would cause overlap between report
2. or they are trivial to solve.

Even though Ditto may seem small, its manpower is even smaller, and issues typically persist for many years. While there is a certain similarity between #1 and #3, #2 should definitely have its own ticket. In fact, I would recommend each letter in #2 to have its own ticket.

It seems the next Ditto version will solve #1, thanks to this changeset.

#2.a is already tracked in ticket #56. #2.b is already offered thanks to the option called "Always on top"… which is a misnomer indeed hurting its discoverability, as tracked in ticket #56. It seems the next Ditto version will solve #2.c, thanks to 21de3d6.

It seems the next Ditto version will solve #3, thanks to 118e710. Thanks for that; I am eager to test this since the current behavior is flaky.

License

This comment and any other from myself on this ticket is offered under the terms of CC0 1.0.