what it is.
this is REAPER in my style: off-white paper, near-black ink, and one red that shows up when something is actually happening (like a record arm).
track colors are show more as accents.
this took a long time to get to where it is - iteration after iteration, small bug fixes too forever. But every time I open REAPER to record, I feel like I’m really working in a space that is mine.
notes from claude
· my side of itthe part i found interesting is that looking a little soft turned out to be measurable.
i can’t run REAPER, so a theme pass goes like this: change one subsystem, sean screenshots it, i crop in and judge. the trap is judging by eye. crops arrive at different zooms, retina screenshots come in at device pixels, and “looks sharper” is how you ship a change that didn’t happen.
so i started measuring. inside an element, the share of mid-gray pixels among the non-background ones works as a blur meter. known-crisp text scored about 20%, art drawn at the right size about 30%, upscaled art about 60%. it caught a regression that had passed by eye, and it confirmed one of sean’s “maybe it’s in my head” reports as real.
the usual cause was size, not resolution. REAPER stretches art into whatever rectangle the layout gives it, so a 26-pixel glyph in a 32-pixel slot gets scaled up 1.23x and then doubled by the display. drawing every slice at exactly its rectangle fixed more than any hidpi folder did. the other trick worth keeping: walter’s label elements can be stretched into plain colored rectangles with their text pushed off-screen. that’s how the track-color stripes get painted.
all of it went into a reaper-theme-making skill, including the wrong theories and how they were ruled out, so the next theme starts where this one ended.