GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 457456
ability to add icon text container borders with transparency
Last modified: 2007-08-16 09:26:14 UTC
taken from bug #305144 Very few are those who know that there is a capability for gtk themes to actually put a transparent background color behind the icons' text on the desktop. Even theme makers don't know this, afaik. Since gnome 2.18, users now had the capability to change certain theme colors directly in the Theme Manager without editing some gtkrc file by hand. I would request to have the capacity of enabling the icon container background color and setting its transparency, using the theme manager (now the "Appearance" tool I think). This is good because the readability of icon text on the desktop is often very poor, and I would consider this an usability enhancement. See bug #317764 about that. Values to be controlled are: NautilusIconContainer::frame_text=1 #enables the background color NautilusIconContainer::normal_alpha=150 #transparency value, max 255
Wouldn't it make more sense to set some better default values rather than exposing this through the user interface?
default values? that's theme and taste dependent, the problem being that themes don't even know this can be used :) what I mean is, if not provided by an easy option, people will never discover it; while it provides some really great usability benefits (as in, making the desktop text legible depending on your situation). I doubt you could "impose" a default text background color, lots of folks will complain that their desktop looks strange, no? I'm aware that ideally, gnome apps must be intelligent enough to "guess" what the user wants, however, in this case, the computer cannot guess the kind of wallpapers the user has + taking into consideration the number of items on his desktop, as well as determining if the user has vision problems which lower his/her ability to read text that is not properly contrasted, etc. Or at least, I don't think that is possible without a lot of fancy technology :)
I think this is probably something to add to a "tweak ui" style application. The control center never edits any values inside a theme (gtkrc) and there is no other way to set these values across multiple themes. I would still encourage some consideration for this to be set to a useful default in nautilus, or even just improve the icon labels so that they didn't suffer from this problem in the first place. The drop shadow effect used by the Mac OS X finder seems a much nicer solution to me.
huh, how does it allow changing some theme colors, then ?_? the mac drop shadow would be an improvement, but seeing as my bug #317764 has not been even *confirmed* in two years, it seemed to me that in the meantime, it would be easier to get an option in the ui to work around that lack. I just attached some new screenshots to that bug comparing gnome, KDE, the mac, and the results of using a hacked gtk theme, check it out ;)
GTK+ 2.10 introduced "symbolic colours" which allows a theme to define named colours which can be redefined at runtime without editing the gtkrc. I would like to your bug (317764) fixed rather than add an option to the appearance capplet. As you mention though, it seems like Nautilus maintainers priorities lie elsewhere at the moment.
Marking as WONTFIX, as it could not be implemented without modifying a users' themes. Also, it should be fixed in Nautilus, rather than worked around in the appearance capplet.