Re: panel prelight on focus

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Jamin Philip Gray <jgray writeme com> writes:

> On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, Alex Larsson wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, Calum Benson wrote:
> > 
> > > Luis Villa wrote:
> > > 
> > > > There must be a better way to do this. This behavior is the most
> > > > frequently reported non-crash bug against the new panel, and if users
> > > > think it is a bug, it is a bug.
> > > 
> > > Well, alternative suggestions are always welcome.  Drawing a dotted box
> > > around the panel is next-to-invisible, though, so I'm not sure what
> > > options there are other than changing the panel background colour.
> > 
> > We could always make it a preference so that only people who really need 
> > it can enable it. I think the current prelighting behaviour is one of the 
> > most irritating things in gnome2.
> 
> Agreed. That seems like the best solution to me.

Not to me... making behavior like this an option is just saying "we
couldn't figure it out, so you can choose between two broken states".

That the panel is focused is actually something anybody with a
keyboard should care about... you should always know what a keystroke
should do.

But using prelight to indicate the focus is just not right... prelight
indicates something about what mousing does.

My suggestion... why not pop up a small "pseudo-titlebar" above the
panel (not full width... probably centered) edge of the panel using
the "focused" colors.

The text on this "pseudo-titlebar" is left as an excercise to the
reader...  simplest would be "GNOME Panel", though that's not terribly
useful information to the user.

Regards,
                                        Owen