GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 735779
Adwaita: Focused/unfocused windows should affect titlebar color/contrast
Last modified: 2014-11-01 15:52:56 UTC
Created attachment 284969 [details] One of these things is not like the other In the default Adwaita theme, there is very little difference between the look of the active window and inactive windows. This can make it difficult to quickly discern which window is the focused window. On my dual 1920x1080 setup it's nearly impossible to tell which window is focused without stopping whatever I am doing to examine windows more closely. I've attached a screenshot which I think illustrates this very well. Hint: You can't *easily* or *quickly* see which window is focused. I know that this behavior has been there forever, but I think it should be revisited.
Your screenshot shows Konsole, which afaik is a Qt app and doesn't use the Adwaita GTK theme. There might be something to be done for it, but I'm not sure this can be fixed in the **GTK** theme. ;) However, here are two screenshots of what happen with GTK3 apps, which certainly show that the difference between focused and unfocused windows could be made more pronounced.
Created attachment 285884 [details] Two gedit windows (GNOME 3.13) Here, the shadow helps, as it's bigger and darker on the focused window. The headerbar is made « flat » in the unfocused window, which helps a bit as well, but maybe it could be made a bit « whiter » (I mean a lighter gray, closer to white) to increase the difference between it and the focused window? Maybe the contrast in the unfocused window chrome (headerbar, buttons,...) could be made lower as well? It doesn't matter much if you can't read the label on a button in the chrome of an unfocused app (you still probably want to be able to read the content though, for exemple if you're reading documentation in a window while coding in another)
Created attachment 285885 [details] Two GNOME Terminal windows (GNOME 3.13) GNOME Terminal with the dark theme somehow doesn't have the big shadows, which makes this case worse than the gedit one. Similarly, there is a slight difference in the chrome of the application between the unfocused and focused window (the latter has a white window title, the former has it gray), but it is very slight and could probably be greatly increased. Overall, this is a case where I find it very difficult to tell which of these windows is focused.
(In reply to comment #1) > Your screenshot shows Konsole, which afaik is a Qt app and doesn't use the > Adwaita GTK theme. There might be something to be done for it, but I'm not sure > this can be fixed in the **GTK** theme. ;) Isn't the titlebar drawn by Gnome/GTK and not Qt? > However, here are two screenshots of what happen with GTK3 apps, which > certainly show that the difference between focused and unfocused windows could > be made more pronounced. Even in the gedit case, you have to actually focus (your eyes) on each window to decide which one is active. It may be better than my konsole example, but not by much. On a high resolution monitor (or two) it's far too much work to pick out which window has the focus. Mac and Windows (Aero) both suffer from the same issue (IMHO) though they have a *little* more contrast than Adwaita, and more importantly, on the Mac, the active window has brightly colored lozenges in the corner and inactive windows have gray ones. My opinion is that there should be a pretty significant difference in contrast in the titlebar colors between active and inactive windows. I think the old Microsoft Windows with blue vs grey had it right (and I'm sure all the Designers just puked, but hopefully some UX people will take notice come up with a good compromise). For me, I'd take *functional* over *pretty* any day.
(In reply to comment #4) > (In reply to comment #1) > > Your screenshot shows Konsole, which afaik is a Qt app and doesn't use the > > Adwaita GTK theme. There might be something to be done for it, but I'm not sure > > this can be fixed in the **GTK** theme. ;) > > Isn't the titlebar drawn by Gnome/GTK and not Qt? not really: the decoration is done by the window manager (which looks like GNOME Shell), which uses its own theme. AFAIR, the colors are taken from the GTK+ theme.
Looking at the screenshot this is more a mutter theme issue then gtk+ since, as Emmanule said, the windows decorations are not drawn by the toolkit, anyway we do the exact same thing when the titlebar is drawn by gtk+ (csd), so it's ok to keep the bug here. With our latest design iteration we're trying to use titlebar as an integral part of the application, not just as a window handle, hence we can't really treat it differently then the rest of chrome (we also indicate mode changes with it, like the selection mode, changing its main color), on native gtk+3 applications we indicate the focus of a window dimming and flattening the chrome of the non focused ones, there are cases though when there isn't much chrome, as Mathieu pointed, making more difficult to notice. The problem exists. We could try playing with shadows, Jakub, what do you think?
Emmanuele, sorry for mispelling your name, even if it's kinda trendy latelly ;)
While the purpose of introducing :backdrop is indeed a clear distinction for the focused window, making all controls in unfocused windows muted may make it seem insensitive. I like using the depth to be the distinction. Unfocused windows being super flat, while focused window having gradients of elements with affordance and edge highlights and shadows. We could, hoever make the headerbar/titlebar a bit more pronounced and dim controls and labels there to be close to how we treat insensitive. I also wouldn't mind toning down the unfocused window shadows even further.
I introduced a bunch of changes to adwaita to try to mitigate those issues, it's on adwaita master so it will get in 3.16 please try that out and report if you can.
*** Bug 738901 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
maybe worth porting to 3.14
Some of those changes has been backported to 3.14 commit c01578284dbdc8c22ed06b392c1c1308962f4ed6 Author: Lapo Calamandrei <calamandrei@gmail.com> Date: Fri Oct 31 15:32:56 2014 +0100 Adwaita: add back text color See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=726316 for details. commit 8055a3723060c388677907a6add0c0ca802d6fd6 Author: Lapo Calamandrei <calamandrei@gmail.com> Date: Fri Oct 31 14:04:25 2014 +0100 Adwaita: dim backdrop foreground color To make the focused window more evident. commit 5e7630c1ee64bb5385bfd8b5e49695f2ac5f3a3d Author: Lapo Calamandrei <calamandrei@gmail.com> Date: Fri Oct 17 20:09:17 2014 +0200 Adwaita: use $backdrop_fg_color where it should .background:backdrop was not using that one so some labels didn't look right in backdrop.
considering this fixed then, provisionally