Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of a good way to disable that braindead window fading "feature" in GTK? If you look at the changelog, the text in the inactive window is barely readable. I have to squint to read it on most monitors.

Fading it is also unnecessary in most applications. Gnome apps need to do it because they have no titlebar, but this isn't a problem in most cases, and xfwm can draw titlebars just fine.

I know I can manually overload the GTK theme's backdrop properties but I was kind of hoping someone on the Interwebs found a way that doesn't require me to drag .css hacks over umpteen computers.

Background: a good chunk of my work involves things like comparing simulation and measurement results among multiple applications/windows. Text in inactive windows being unreadable is a little counterproductive when I try to do that. I begrudgingly put up with the huge widgets but having to squint at screens for eight hours a day is not fun.

(FWIW, Adwaita is even worse).

I think it's the compositor doing that. In XFCE, you can control that from the "Window Manager Tweaks" app, in the "compositor" tab.

It's not the compositor, sadly, this is a GTK "feature". GTK allows you to define colors for various elements separately, depending on whether the window has focus or not. This is a good idea on paper, but in practice it seems this either doesn't have enough granularity (to allow e.g. dimming button text, which is probably useless when the window doesn't have focus, but not the text in text views, for instance, which you might actually want to read even from unfocused windows), or most theme designers, including Adwaita's, use it indiscriminately.

If you have a high-DPI monitor with good contrast it actually looks okay. But I routinely have to work with work-issued, ten year-old monitors in artificially-lit offices. It's really terrible.

I see. I guess the only solution is to go on a theme hunt, then. I use Bunsen themes with XFCE, and haven't encountered that problem, but I don't use a lot of GTK3 apps.

Settings | Window Manager Tweaks | Compositor | Opacity of inactive windows

That is not what I'm asking about. I don't mean the opacity of inactive window. What I want to disable is GTK's setting of the color of various elements depending on whether the window has focus or not. Even with compositor opacity set at 100%, GTK windows that don't have focus get that dim grey text. The color is, technically, theme-defined; unfortunately, both Adwaita and Greybird use a really low-contrast color that I find really difficult to read on some monitors.

Why not edit/fork the theme?

Or use a different theme.

That's what I'm doing at the moment. However, that means a) maintaining a custom GTK theme which, given upstream's commitment to theming, is about as fun as chewing nails and about as reliable as a teapot made of chocolate and b) dragging it with me across multiple computers. I was hoping there's a better option.

not 100% sure if this will help, but i use this to disable shadows and weird border-glow-edge related stuff on "my theme". yes, i know you didn't want CSS hacks, but... https://github.com/walderf/dotfiles/blob/main/.config/gtk-3....

here's what "my theme" looks like with this in place - https://i.imgur.com/SZ1iZjf.png

if you're curious, here's the rest of it - https://github.com/walderf/dotfiles/tree/main/.local/share/t...

it's not perfect, but, it's alright, really. maybe i will finish it and package it better some year. doubt it, though! :)

No solution, only sympathy, but I agree, what an unpleasant situation. You get me started I will go on and on about how much better our desktop environment could be if designers cared a little more about how things work, not just how they look.

unable to select/copy any arbitrary text(A major saving grace of the web app is that you can actually select text)

modal dialogs.

being able manipulate a lower window without raising it.

Yeah, tell me about it.

My personal pet peeve is "crowded interfaces". Lots of modern facelifts attempt to solve the "clutter" problem by making the widgets larger and improving widget space and padding. Which does actually make the whole thing look nicer, and does make things easier to find to some degree...

...except it also reduces the document viewport, literally making the space I look at most of the time more cluttered just in order to get the part I almost never look at to look better.

I swear to God the quality of modern interfaces would skyrocket if the people who design them had to learn how to use them first and just go through a project with them, start to finish. Bullshit like monochrome icons you can't tell apart and touch-sized widgets on professional workstations would evaporate in a matter of months.

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