How do I get the look of v7.5? It was brighter and nicer and didn’t feel like claustrophobic. C8 is way too dark for me. And I LOVE dark themes.
So, how do I get it back to v8? Someone please tell me there’s a way to do this. Otherwise I might have to go back to 7.5 (render in place and window management got me to C8 and I really don’t want to lose it!)
Well you can tweak the colors a bit in Preferences (don’t get your hopes too high). But in general the look they give you is the look you get. Also try setting your default Track Color to something lighter, since that covers a fair amount of screen space.
I’m curious, why would you give the cosmetic characteristics of the program more importance than the functional ones when deciding which version to use?
Speaking for myself, the above is a big reason that I haven’t investigated Ableton too deeply, because it hurts my eyes looking at it and I can’t imagine getting stuck into a project on it would be much fun! 
I normally wouldn’t, but I guess I’m spoiled. Add to the fact C7.5 pretty much does EVERYTHING I need, except for Render in Place. And I’m already investigating to see if that gap can be fulfilled with a macro or MEAP. If that’s done, I wouldn’t need C8.
Its not just the look, the fonts look terrible. C7.5 had beautiful fonts everywhere. The window management is a big deal but I can still live without it cos most of my stuff is hosted in VEP which has its own monitor.
One thing I dislike about v8’s look is the font thickness. I think it reduces how long track names can be before they’re abbreviated with ‘…’, and have ‘…’ makes make track name indecipherable. Also, the ‘…’ takes up more space than adding a single further letter, and so I wish tracks wouldn’t be abbreviated until a letter or two later.
But, I’d prefer them to not be abbreviated at all. It is easier to tell what Guitar solo dub 7 is, when it’s ‘Guitar solo du’, than when it’s ‘Guit … 7’.
If the font thickness were reduced, more letter could fit in the track name, and if the ‘…’ were changed, things would be even clearer to read.