Re: Hard-coded colors

[Misu Moldovan <dumol home ro>]

On 07.03, ora 17:14, Peter Bloomfield wrote:
> On 03/07/2004 08:18:57 AM, Albrecht Dreß wrote:
> > Am 06.03.04 23:17 schrieb(en) Misu Moldovan:
> >> I see two solutions:
> >> 
> >> 1) no colors for the messages in the headers, only for the  
> >> icons
> >> 2) colors can be changed by the user in the preferences
> > 
> > MiÅŸu, I see your problem (and probabely, as there are so many  
> > themes, you're not alone with that...). Actually, the short  
> > description is either red or green (bad/good signature). Having  
> > a quick look at the prefs, we could abuse the color for a bad  
> > address (default red) and the color for unread mailboxes  
> > (default green) for that. Would this be an improvement for you?  
> > I must admit that adding more options to the prefs looks like a  
> > bad idea to me, as the dialog is already crowded.
> > 
> > Comments?
> 
> The `unread mailbox' color has gone in Balsa 2.1, so that  
> solution wouldn't port.  The reason for dropping it is precisely  
> the same as here--using hard-coded colors just doesn't work with  
> themes.
> 
> How about using font changes to emphasize the signature status  
> instead?  In 2.1, new mail is indicated by bold (mailbox with new  
> mail, unread message) or slant (folder containing mailbox with  
> new mail, message with unread descendant) or both.
> 
> Alternatively, you could try to construct, from the theme, a  
> color that will be legible...but deconstructing the theme was a  
> pain in getting the new message formatting to theme reasonably,  
> wasn't it?
> 
> Peter
> 

For a moment I thought Albrecht's idea was brilliant. And it is 
probably the best thing to do in the 2.0.x tree. As far as the 
HEAD tree is concerned, getting rid of some prefs sounds good. And 
doing that without hurting people that use dark themes seems 
challenging, but not impossible. 

I only know about one pref that Balsa really needs in order to 
look great with dark themes (maybe that changed with GTK+ 1.3.x, 
didn't have the time to check it). It's the color of the links 
(URLs). GTK+ has a hard-coded blue color, and that cannot be 
changed within a theme AFAIK. Balsa solved the problem a long 
time ago by implementing it's own color for links. 

Maybe the time to fill a bug report for GTK+ regarding that 
hard-coded blue color has come? No dark theme looks nice with 
blue links and at some time in the past I tried them all, 
believing that there is a way to change the color of the links 
in a GTK+ theme. And there might be one, but no one knows it,  
all the dark theme look awful with blue links.

--
MiÅŸu