Re: prelight, again

[John Cupitt <john cupitt ng-london org uk>]

Paul Davis wrote:
> Are there are any plans to allow disabling of prelight, globally, in
> any future version of GTK? 
>
> Prelighting conflicts absolutely with the use of color to distinguish
> widget state. For a simple demonstration, consider this style:
>        
>        style "foo" {
>            fg[NORMAL] = { 1.0, 0.0, 0.0 }
> 	   fg[ACTIVE] = { 0.0, 0.0, 1.0 }
>        }
>
> Consider what color the widget should appear in PRELIGHT. Should it be
> red? Should it be blue? Some other color?
>
> Thanks. We have had quite a lot of feedback (relatively speaking)
> about this issue in ardour, where we make extensive use of style files
> to define colors that distinguish widget (and ultimately "model" (as
> in MVC)) states. People find it very distracting and annoying that
> prelight always adopts *one* specific color, independent of the state
> of the widget.

Maybe this wouldn't work for you, but I get around this problem by having a separate style for each state and flipping widgets between them with a gtk_widget_set_name(). For example:

# style for widgets with errors in them
style "error_style" = "default"
{
       bg[NORMAL] = "#C1665A"
       bg[PRELIGHT] = "#E0B6AF"
       bg[ACTIVE] = "#C1665A"
       bg[SELECTED] = "#C1665A"
       bg[INSENSITIVE] = "#884631"
}

# style for dirty widgets (need recalculation)
style "dirty_style" = "default"
{
       bg[NORMAL] = "#E0C39E"
       bg[PRELIGHT] = "#EFE0CD"
       bg[ACTIVE] = "#E0C39E"
       bg[SELECTED] = "#E0C39E"
       bg[INSENSITIVE] = "#B39169"
}

widget "*error_widget" style "error_style"
widget "*dirty_widget" style "dirty_style"

then on view refresh, my app looks at the model state and uses gtk_widget_set_name() to set how that widget should be rendered.

John