Closing this report since the Win98 theme issue is fixed with changeset http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/2355f66cf91d

The issue with background colors of some ui elements is still present on other platforms than windows and is back again on windows due to the non Win98 style. Therefore bug #49247 was reopened.

I agree to push the style-selection-patch and to reopen bug #49247.

I slightly modified your patch for using stylesheets for coloring the buttons. This seems to be working now for the windowsvista style (see attaches screenshot).
I don't know whether adding "background:" is necessary. But I left it in from your original patch.

Maybe we can do something similar for the popupmenu.

I'd vote for pushing the patch for this bug and re-opening bug #49247 for a more general fix.
Opinions?

(file #45645,

@Torsten: Your patch works for me on Windows 10.

Available styles are "windowsvista" (the new default), "windows" (the old default), and "fusion".
Switching between styles updates the GUI immediately. No restart needed.
Thumps up!

The attachment bug53174_style_selection.patch provides the possibility to select the desired style in the "Gerenal" tab of the preferences dialog. Moreover, setting the style at startup to "Windows" on window systems is removed.

The patch is tested on Ubuntu/Gnome. Testing on other platforms is very much appreciated.

Did anyone try to implement the approach that Alexander outlined in comment #19?

If this worked for all styles, that would be a true fix for the the issue in bug #49247.
Even if it doesn't, I'd be inclined to vote in favour of the selection box for styles (and maybe also change the default on Windows to a more modern style). With that feature, a user who needed coloured ui buttons could easily select a different style as a work-around.

Instead of using setPalette, one can apparently use CSS-like style sheets: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/stylesheet-examples.html and http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/stylesheet-examples.html#customizing-qradiobutton

The stylesheet can be set for specific widgets:

QColor col = QColor::fromRgb(144,238,144);
QString qss = QString("background-color: %1").arg(col.name());   button->setStyleSheet(qss);

cf. https://stackoverflow.com/a/48555125

As a last resort, we could resort to checking the version of Windows.

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12889180/how-to-accurately-get-windows-os-version-with-c

Also, https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724833(v=vs.85).aspx

Does the test_gui_backgroundcolor.m example attached to bug #49247 still work after removing the line?

Nice, thanks for testing that.

That would be nice, but I don't have a Windows machine to test if changing http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/file/90bd5649983c/libgui/src/octave-gui.cc#l168 to windowsvista works.

Does removing that line or changing it to "windowsvista" fix the theme?

I tried building a Windows version, but it fails, since epstool can't be downloaded.

Yes, that might be the best solution.

TeXstudio has a dropdown with all available options in its settings dialog:

https://github.com/texstudio-org/texstudio/blame/011e40ae5066b1903e9af0082dd595703e0183d6/src/configmanager.cpp#L1123

https://github.com/texstudio-org/texstudio/blame/011e40ae5066b1903e9af0082dd595703e0183d6/src/configmanager.cpp#L1471

QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE doesn't have any effect for 4.2.1 either.

If the patch works, is an additional option necessary? I don't know if Qt falls back to the "windows" style when the user manually sets the win98/win2000 theme for the entire desktop.

I attached a patch.

(file #43339)

Were older versions of Octave for Windows build using MinGW, which would have made the "windowsvista" style available?

Cf. http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qstylefactory.html#details