GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 738482
Meld no longer colourises different/added lines with GTK+ 3.14
Last modified: 2014-12-12 21:27:44 UTC
2014-10-11 16:14 GMT+02:00 Christoph Anton Mitterer <calestyo@scientia.net>: ... > Since some versions now, meld no longer colourises the lines > that were modified/added or e.g. the current lines in the > editor part itself. > Only a tiny bit outside the editor widget is still drawn, > as the attached screenshot shows.
Please find the screenshot in Debian's BTS: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=764823
Yes, this is due to a change in GTK+ 3.14; see bug 737957. Current master has a workaround that sort-of-maybe fixes this, but in doing so it's completely messed up drawing of text selections for the text view. I don't yet know whether this is actually solvable without significant redo of our drawing. The fix would also require a dependency bump to GTK 3.14 to work with new GTK, which is something we've never actually had to do before. Since our current GTK+ dependency is 3.6, that's... quite a bump. Either way, this change won't go in until Meld 3.14 at the earliest. I will cherry-pick the workaround onto the 3.12 stable branch if I can figure out a way to fix the text selection drawing.
As I've mentioned in the Debian bug,... the "new way of how it looks" may actually be quite nice for some people... i.e. that the text filed is completely or nearly white, and only the differences per line are shown with highly saturated colours. Guess one should have an options dialogue, that fully allows one to configure the colours,... like without that bug,... I always found the difference in colour between the "background" and the actual changed parts of a line too slight...
*** Bug 739085 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
As pointed out in bug 739085, this is partially fixed on master. The reason there isn't a release for this bug yet is that I don't consider it to be properly fixed. The coloured chunks are back, sure, but as soon as you select any text in the editor the drawing is horrible again. I have a partial fix for the selection colour issue locally, but it won't work across different themes. I'm hoping to get that fixed very soon, and I'll push out a new release for it ASAP.
(In reply to comment #3) > As I've mentioned in the Debian bug,... the "new way of how it looks" may > actually be quite nice for some people... i.e. that the text filed is > completely or nearly white, and only the differences per line are shown with > highly saturated colours. > > > Guess one should have an options dialogue, that fully allows one to configure > the colours,... like without that bug,... I always found the difference in > colour between the "background" and the actual changed parts of a line too > slight... I'm definitely not going to support the buggy appearance as a thing in its own right. I can see that the default colours might not have enough contrast for some people though, so please feel free to file a bug for that. We've had open bugs for supporting themes for Meld for years, but it's just never happened. As of 3.12 it's finally all themed with external CSS, so if you want to experiment with the highlighting colours it's pretty simple to do so. If you wanted to produce a saner version of the buggy appearance, just messing with the alpha of the *-bg classes in the CSS should do the job.
I've just pushed a fix to master for the text selection issue, so I'm considering grafting both of those back to make a 3.12.1. Feedback on whether these fix the problem for others would be greatly appreciated.
I've pushed this to the 3.12 branch, and it's in the just-released 3.12.1. Thanks for the bug report.
Thanks, it fixed the issue.
It seems there is a regression with at least one theme :-(: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=764823#61 : > Hi, > > While the fix in 3.12.1-1 brings back the coloring of modified/added > lines, it makes the text in the editor widgets hardly readable in my > setup. > > I'm using KDE with the Oxygen theme and gtk3-engines-oxygen to make > GTK3 applications look OK. After upgrading to 3.12.1-1, the text in > the editor widgets suddenly gets dark gray on a black background. > That is, basically only the text colored by syntax highlighting is > readable. Downgrading to 3.12.0-1 restores the previous black-on-white > text coloring. > > Any ideas? > > Thanks, > Markus >
Was the oxygen theme engine colouring the modified lines correctly previously (in 3.12.0)? If so, I could just add an exception to not apply this workaround if the current theme engine is called 'oxygen' or whatever it is. However, if the diff colouring was previously broken and we've swapped that for broken non-diff colouring, then... I mean... ugh. I guess it would be possible to manually draw the background everywhere? but this is just getting beyond awful.
In my interpretation Meld's colouring was broken but the text was visible. I don't plan making a new upload for fixing the issue for Jessie since it affects only a special theme so far. Maybe the next GTK+ version helps solving the colouring problems in a nicer way. :-)
(In reply to comment #12) > In my interpretation Meld's colouring was broken but the text was visible. Yeah, other reports indicate that that's the case. > I don't plan making a new upload for fixing the issue for Jessie since it > affects only a special theme so far. Unfortunately, this is the default theme in some distributions (OpenSuse, probably Kubuntu). > Maybe the next GTK+ version helps solving the colouring problems in a nicer > way. :-) Sadly, it won't. Meld will eventually use the newer drawing method, but since I can't support both the old and new drawing method while retaining sanity, I need to require GTK+ 3.14 and that won't be until the release after next. Anyway, there's now bug 741287 for tracking the oxygen theme issue, so I'm just going to re-close this. Thanks again.