Re: panel focus indication

[chabotc chabotc xs4all nl]

On Thu, 28 Mar 2002, Bill Haneman wrote:

> Chris Chabot wrote:
> > Ofcource this leaves the issue open for people who select a background
> > color for the panel, or select a background image. They go from 'some
> > color' to bright highlighted grey.. quite a shocking experiance ;-) Was
> > this problem ever thought about when we decided to make the panel highlight?
> Yes ;-)
> I believe that background pixmaps are themeable (in pixmap GTK+ themes).
> Any pixmap stuff that an app does (including the panel) should be
> themed / themeable.  Logically the panel should only use pixmaps if the 
> theme engine does...

So we are left with two options then it seems (from a laymans 
perspective). Either rip out the ability to set the panels background 
color or pixmap (and transparency, which was present in g1.4), or face 
'the beast' and replicate all basic gtk theme stuff for the panel (have 
the panel have its own overridable color & font settings thru either its 
own config or some gtkrc settable stuff).

There's a lot to say for being able to change the apearance of the panel, 
it is for most people a part of their background / desktop, and not a 
percievable application. (if i want my panel in dark blue since it matches 
my nautilus desktop look and my background image, i want to be able to do 
that without making _every_ gtk2 using application blue ;-) Quite often a 
person might want to match the panel color to the color or apearane of the 
window manager theme.

Ofcource the uses of this is obvious, think OSX (transparent with 
launchers?) and think WindowsXP (blue gradient), etc.. 

In my opinion it would be a large limitation for the gnome 2 envirioment 
to disallow this, and a large feature regression from the 1.4 code base.

However, talk and opinions are cheap, and i'm not a highly skilled panel 
hacker .. ;-) However my crystal ball tells me this will be one of the 
more user mentioned complaints if we don't do this 'right' from the users 
perspective (and miss out on some potentialu spectacular nice desktop 
looks)

	-- Chris