Fanaro's Sabaki Theme Collection

This article is mostly a pointer to the hopefully well documented repo.

You can download the themes here.

The idea behind that package came to me after getting tired of looking at the mostly same design in multiple Go editors. It seemed to me a waste of potential to have the malleability of software and stay stuck with the same standard design from hundreds of years ago, if not thousands. This is an old idea of mine but I didn't quite have the know-how to pull off anything against it until a few years ago, and then it was a matter of battling laziness and finding an editor which allowed its user to mess around with its design. Luckily, Sabaki fits the bill.

The most important point, at least initially, of the repo is to experiment with very basic variations on the design, developing benchmarks for what is visually pleasant or not. The reason this is so crucial is due to the natural counter-attacks you will get when presenting them as ideas to your fellow Go players: they will very likely strikethrough any "weird" ideas. Now, you can show this repo instead, and end the prejudice.

Creating a new theme is not at all hard with Sabaki. There are 4 basic ingredients to it:

• packages.json: where you store the theme's metadata, and a pointer to the style's file.
• styles.css: where the styling of your theme happens. Here you will point to your media assets, as in stones, goban, etc.
• Media Assets: you will need to create images for the stones, goban, background, etc. You can use any image editor — e.g. Illustrator, GIMP, Inkscape, Photoshop, etc. — to do this, these are simple images.
• Packaging: use asar pack <folder> <theme-name>.asar to package your theme into an asar file, which is what's accepted by Sabaki as a theme. You will need to install the asar tool with NPM first, of course.

The easiest way of creating a theme, though, is to copy one of the many available in my repo and then modify it as needed.

What might not be so easy to do is to tinker with some more specific and unusual elements. Apparently, Sabaki does allow it, you can check out more about it in this issue, or in the documentation itself. An example of modifying the grid color can be seen in the image below:

Anyway, I hope you fork or contribute to this project! Go could certainly benefit from more art and new designs!