Hello! This is my first post so I hope the forum category is OK. I have been using Syncthing since 2022 and I really like it. Thank you also for providing other language support in the GUI because many other software don’t always do non English which I find very bad. I can happily use it in my native language so I understand it well. By the way the Syncthing.net main website only displays in English to me so is that not available in translated versions? It would broaden Syncthing’s appeal further if the main site can be read in other languages too. As even I don’t speak it well and have to use translation tools to read and write formally.
Anyway my main point for this topic is a feature suggestion. The GUI provides a simple white and a ‘dark’ theme. It’s functional but I do want to see the possibility of more themes and coloring. For example a yellow, pink or beige background. That would make the interface feel more fun and much more cozy feeling. This also includes icons because currently it’s just basic monochrome. It would be very nice to have the ability for a nicer colorful and more diverse icon pack as an option.
My second suggestion is to add sound support. For example the ability for it to play a short WAV file (like those built in Windows) when Syncthing starts, stops, or fails, or some other notification comes up. This would be very useful in the environment I am in where I have PCs turned on and processing things but am not always available to look at screens or monitor them all for sync activity. This is where audible feedback would be useful.
I understand that this likely is not being an important priority for Syncthing developers but I imagine it is not difficult to achieve so I hope to see these little features added too.
Honestly, I doubt that any of the developers currently care enough to implement other themes, but if someone tries to contribute to the GUI in this aspect, I’m sure it would be looked at and reviewed. Please keep in mind that you can also add new themes yourself locally, without a need to recompile Syncthing itself. Of course, you do need to know how to code them in CSS in order to do so.
Adding sounds sounds a bit more convoluted, because there are also copyrights to consider, so it would have to be something with an open license, or your own creation.
Not sure your environment but you could possibly create a separate app that can monitor all of your syncthing instances via the REST api and alert as is appropriate for your environment.
CSS is not something I can do as that is not my field. The best I can do is manually replacing the icons if they are in for example PNG format. But such a thing does not exist in the Syncthing directory so that may not be possible.
That sounds really complex to me. I am not an active software developer to work with API, sorry. All I can do is hope that the Syncthing makers can implement these as simple functions within.
I think adding more themes to the UI isn’t that hard. You could probably do it yourself by tweaking the CSS a little bit, in the same way as the existing themes are implemented.
Syncthing Tray can show notifications for some of the events you have mentioned. It uses platform APIs to do that. I’m not sure whether these make a sound under Windows but probably they do or it is somehow configurable. (Under KDE Plasma one can configure the sound for each type of notification so there it is definitely possible.)
The API is easy to use if you can do some kind of scripting. In Windows, you can use Powershell or old-school DOS Batch files — they’re not hard to learn. Most other OSes that run Syncthing, it’s a straightforward shell script. The hardest part is parsing the output, and jq (https://jqlang.org) is freeware and does that — jq can be challenging to use, but ChatGPT has helped a bunch with that.
There’s plenty of help available here for that. Scripting is easy to learn if you understand your OS’s CLI.
