Temporary KColorScheme change - hard-code some state colors

[Jos Poortvliet]

On 9/17/07, Richard Dale <richard_dale at tipitina.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> On Monday 17 September 2007, pinheiro wrote:
> > > No, the hack to use the inactive control color palette for entire windows
> > > is just broken and can never be made to work properly.
> >
> > Plese explain me how come? sory coding is not my experties.
> The active/inactive palette api and visual appearance is designed for showing
> enabled/disabled controls within a window. Hence, text becomes grayed out and
> less readable which doesn't matter for an inactive control, but it does if
> you are trying to read text in an inactive window. All the active/inactive
> window visual metaphor is supposed be doing is to say 'if you type a key on
> your keyboard it will go to this window', it isn't trying to say 'you
> shouldn't really be reading this text' on inactive windows, as grayed out
> would indicate.
>
> The X-Window window manager is more primitive than the Mac OS X one, and we
> have to be careful to stay within it's limitations. The flashing re-draws etc
> that people have reported, just can't be worked round easily. Then there are
> the networking bandwidth problems, incompatibility with other toolkit
> problems, that people have discussed on this thread.
>
> > > The visual metaphor
> > > you use for indicating the an individual control is inactive is different
> > > from the metaphor that you might want to use within the window contents
> > > to indicate the entire window is inactive. If you tune the colors to make
> > > the inactive window effect less intrusive, it will mean the the effect
> > > for inactive controls will probably be wrong. There are various other
> > > issues too, such as some windows like passive popups never becoming the
> > > key window and so they will always be dimmed.
> > >
> > > We would need to use another mechanism entirely to do the effect that Mac
> > > OS X has - ie only change the color of the knob in a scroll bar and only
> > > just the color of selections. The inactive palette effect does far more
> > > than just that. I assume that the Qt style for Mac OS X must do this
> > > already, and maybe there is some api in Qt to allow it to work that we
> > > could experiment with using.
> >
> > Yes i know mac does that but i would like to try chaging it all like in my
> > other mock.
> Well I'm still not convinced it is technically possible.

I'd like to add that I'm pretty sure that it's not just a technical
issue, that flashing - a soon as you change the whole window suddenly,
your brain sees a flash. Unless you animate it, or do it gradually, it
wouldn't flash, but I'm pretty sure THAT would REALLY be a technical
problem ;-)

If you really want to change the look of the whole window, I think
KWin would be the way to go, and yes, that won't work without at least
XRENDER accelleration (which has been pretty much standard in pc's
since 10 years, so it's not a huge problem if you have the 'change
windowdecoration' as fallback).

> -- Richard
>
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