Develop Reference

android-add top padding to Chip text

I'm using Chip component from material library in my android app. It is an action chip which has an icon and a text inside. the point is that I need to add some padding to the top of the text in order to bring it down a little a bit.
I have tried to add textAppearance style to the chip, but can not find any style item to do what i need. how to do that?!
<com.google.android.material.chip.Chip
android:id="#+id/chip"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
app:chipIcon="#drawable/satisfied"
app:chipIconTint="#444"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:text="my text!"
android:textAppearance="#style/Widget.App.Chip" />
<style name="Widget.App.Chip" parent="Widget.MaterialComponents.Chip.Action">
<item name="android:textSize">14dp</item>
<item name="android:fontFamily">#font/xyz</item>
<item name="android:textStyle">bold</item>
// what item is needed to achieve top padding?!
</style>

simply: you can't. Chip is designed as is and it extends AppCompatCheckBox and further TextView (doc HERE). so these icons on the left and/or right are compound drawables, not separated Views (e.g. ImageViews), so every padding you will set to Chip will add padding to text and all icons (as this is one View). for your purposes you must create own custom View, easiest way would be probably to create horizontal LinearLayout with childs: TextView and ImageViews on left and right to it, and then you can set additional padding only for text

Two textviews with different colors using one theme?

I'm new to android and I have been trying to find out an answer to this. I have a layout file .xml for listview that has two textviews, one is for heading with a greater size and other below is for description. What I want is that heading textview's text stays white and description textview's text stays grey in my current theme. That is dark theme. But user has the option to change the theme, so when user selects Light theme I want my heading textview's text (that is within layout that I have for listview's rows) to become black and also the description textview's text to become black.
Please help and thanks in advance.

you can set the text color programmatically using the method textView.setTextColor(int color), or via XML using the attribute android:textColor="#yourhexcolor"

You can change theme programmatically. There is one guy asked this hours ago. Can you check this: how-to-change-colour-when-user-wants-another-colour-in-the-app
Also if you want to use diferent themes for different TextViews you can try like :
textView.setTextAppearance(context, android.R.style.TextAppearance_Small);
How can i create custom themes for TextViews
in your styles.xml create different styles :
<style name="MyBlueTextTheme" parent="#android:style/TextAppearance.Medium">
<item name="android:textSize">18sp</item>
<item name="android:textColor">#123456</item>
<item name="android:textStyle">bold</item>
</style>
Then use it like :
<TextView
android:id="#+id/textBlue"
android:text="This is a blue styled text"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_gravity="center"
style="#style/MyBlueTextTheme" />
Or use it like: textView.setTextAppearance(context,R.style.MyBlueTextTheme);
but its deprecated and you can use textView.setTextAppearance(R.style.MyBlueTextTheme); but this can be used Api23 or higher

Issues changing the color of views

So I am trying to change my app color to blue and some of most the views I have are not willing to cooperate with me.
Here is the image:
Here I want to change the color of the green parts on the spinner, edittext and checkbox views (which are green) to black or blue.
I've looked all over Stack Overflow and I can't find the solution!
Thank you very much, If possible I would like to have a XML solution but I wouldn't mind a programmatic solution!

Add these to your base theme in styles.xml
<item name="colorControlNormal">#color/YOUR_COLOR</item>
<item name="colorControlActivated">#color/YOUR_COLOR</item>
<item name="colorControlHighlight">#color/YOUR_COLOR</item>
Note: The above change will affect the EditTexts and other views probably throughout the application.
If not, and if you are using the AppCompat v22 support library, you can specify the theme in the EditText like: android:theme="#style/Theme.App.Base.
This will ensure the style won't also affect other views in your layouts that you don't want to change
Also if you want to change the above solution, just add another Theme specific to EditTexts and Spinners and apply it to all Spinners if you want
<style name="MyWidgetTheme">
<item name="colorControlNormal">#color/YOUR_COLOR</item>
<item name="colorControlActivated">#color/YOUR_COLOR</item>
<item name="colorControlHighlight">#color/YOUR_COLOR</item>
</style>
and in your EditText, Spinner or any other View, just assign this theme:
<EditText
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:hint="Demo"
android:lines="1"
android:theme="#style/MyWidgetTheme"
/>
<Spinner
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:theme="#style/MyWidgetTheme"></Spinner>

Take a look to this resource generator.
Choose your color, the widgets you want to generate and voila! You copy them to your project and reference them in your xmls.

Eclipse GUI shows newly styled button incorrectly

I'm starting with a fully working app, with all the buttons in the right locations and the right sizes... but now I wanted to try out using styles for the first time. In particular I wanted to have the text colour in my buttons a dark blue and the background white. So I wrote the following in styles.xml in res/values ->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
<style name="mybut" parent="#android:style/Widget.Button">
<item name="android:textColor">#color/dblue</item>
<item name="android:background">#ffffffff</item>
</style>
</resources>
I modified my button code as follows:
<Button
android:id="#+id/spec"
style="#style/mybut" <-- I added this line here
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_weight="0.12"
android:text="#string/spec" />
In eclipse's XML viewer, the new button looked right in every way. But then at run time, on my android device, the button's height had shrunk by about a third! Any ideas?
EDIT: I'm not very confident about the parent="#android:style/Widget.Button" bit. I'm suspicious that perhaps I'm somehow already using some other style?/theme? and perhaps the line should look something akin to parent="#android:otherstyle/Widget.Button" or parent="#android:style/other.Widget.Button"... or similar.
EDIT: FYI... I'm trying this out on a kind of "home screen" activity which just contains two big buttons. I added the style="#style/mybut" to just one of the two buttons. They are now clearly very different sizes.
EDIT: I noticed that in the manifest I have android:theme="#android:style/Theme.NoTitleBar.Fullscreen" ... does that mean I need to make my button's parent android:theme="#android:style/Theme.NoTitleBar.Fullscreen.Widget.Button" ?? or something like that?

By default, a Button has a 9-patch background, not a simple color. This image has padding and a content area which alters the actual size of the button.
When you change the background, you're stripping that padding, and it appears smaller. The correct way to do this is to create a new 9-patch, based on the old, but with the colors changed.

The problem must be here:
android:layout_weight="0.12"
If you have an action_bar or something like that when you run your app the button is going to shrink. In your preview the action_bar doesn't appear (I'm just guessing).
EDIT:
Here is a sample of a custom button that I use in my app, I put a min height and width.
Instead of using: parent="#android:style/Widget.Button" I use: parent="android:Widget.Button"
<style name="ButtonCustom" parent="android:Widget.Button">
<item name="android:background">#drawable/btn_default_holo_light</item>
<item name="android:minHeight">48dip</item>
<item name="android:minWidth">64dip</item>
<item name="android:textColor">#fff</item>
</style>

How can I debug an Android style inheritance issue?

When doing web development, you can inspect an element and see which classes provide which css rules. Is there an equivalent for Android development?
TLDR; Here's an example of a style inheritance problem that I had and solved:
I had a dialog has the Holo theme, but the text color was dark, even when I tried to set the text color to white.
This is the dialog layout:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content">
<ListView android:id="#android:id/list"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
style="#style/Theme.Dialog"/>
</RelativeLayout>
In the style.xml resource:
<style name="Theme.Dialog" parent="android:style/Theme.Holo.Dialog">
<item name="android:windowTitleStyle">#android:style/TextAppearance.Large</item>
<item name="android:textColor">#color/solid_white</item>
<item name="android:windowNoTitle">true</item>
</style>
It turned out that I was using a Fragment whose Activity was a ListActivity, and it defined getView, which created the view from an xml style that set the text color to be dark. It would have liked to see what was setting the text color.

I agree with the comments on your question, but for future, if you want to get an idea of the view hierarchy (not styles) for your app - you can do so in Eclipse.
Run the app.
Window > Open Perspective > DDMS.
In the DDMS pane, click the icon to the left that looks like a stack of phones (next to the camera icon)
You can mouse around the screen and get a visual representation of the view hierarchy.
Might help in some way.