GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 726316
Backdrop inconvenient on multimonitor for reading text
Last modified: 2014-10-20 10:08:53 UTC
The backdrop theme feels inconvenient on multimonitor setup, since it gives less contrast to the unfocused application, so the text is more difficult to read. Since, at least in my case, I use multimonitor just for reading text in the secondary while working on the primary, I think gtk+ (or gnome-shell?) should manage that and only apply backdrop theme on unfocused applications but the ones that are not in first plane.
We might need to be more careful about toning down "content". :backdrop should flatten and tone down the chrome, but actual video/ images and text should retain contrast.
I will appreciate that for my day work. Thanks for considering.
I see what you mean, I think the ideal solution would be to tone down chrome only leaving content alone, problem is that we don't know what content is by the theme, probably a .content style applied to actuall content would allow us to properly solve this issue.
I think I have a solution, basically I resurrected text color, which opposed to fg color doesn't get dimmed much. So the fix I'm pushing uses (yet another) color for text entries and views in general, I used black (white in the dark variant) to increase contrast some more and it gets just sligtly dimmed in backdrop, so the end result is a backdrop window with, say, button text, labels and various controls text quite a bit dimmed to have a nice differentiation from the focused window while the content remains pretty contrasted so easy to read. Unfortunatelly I had to add back @theme_text_color and it's backdrop variant (@theme_unfocused_text_color) to the API level exported color, but I guess it's unavoidable. Carlos tell me what you think.
Fixed on https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/commit/?id=062f450709c4b365fc76d82bbed7fec6048ea134