Lack of visual distinction between active and inactive windows

[Robie Basak]

User story:

I switch virtual workspaces (using Ctrl-Alt-Right) to a workspace with two terminal windows in it. I start typing into the window I want because I think it is active already. Expected behaviour: the correct window gets my input. Actual behaviour: the input goes into the wrong window because I was wrong about which window I thought was active.

Commentary:

When I upgraded to a previous release (I forget which one exactly) the distinction between active and inactive title bars dropped and I couldn't tell at a glance if a window was active without specifically comparing the title bars with other windows. But I noticed that only the active window had the title bar buttons in orange. So I started looking for that. But in Jammy, that's also now gone, and so there's no immediately obvious cue for me to tell if a window is active just by looking at it. It's basically just down to comparing greys. And I can't differentiate the absolute level of grey just by looking at it. It has become necessary for me to look at two different windows to compare their relative grey levels in order to determine which one is active.

I think this is a usability regression for the default theme.

[Robie Basak (racb)]

I'm on yaru-theme-gtk 22.04.3.1

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Paul (jupiter007)]

Hi,
we fixed this: https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru/pull/3608

[Robie Basak (racb)]

Thanks!

Is there any possibility of fixing this in Jammy? I'm aware we're past UI Freeze but I don't know how that would interact with usability fixes, exceptions, etc.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package yaru-theme - 22.04.4

---------------
yaru-theme (22.04.4) jammy; urgency=medium

  [ Marco Trevisan (Treviño) ]
  * icons: Ensure symlinks are installed as such for all variants
  * icons: Avoid adding symlink to parent dark variants if not enabled
  * icons: Cleanup meson file, re-organizing logic
  * CI: Add CI job that builds debian packages and builds them
  * build-ci: Compile both default and full options
  * gtk/index.theme: Follow the standard on index definition.
    There's not a real standard definition but the latest one is still
    defined at https://wiki.xfce.org/gnome-theme-package
  * gtk: Include some X-Yaru parameters on index.theme
  * accent-colors: Also override $accent_color variable.
    It's used by libadwaita for now, but could be used more, so let's define
    it too.
  * gtk: Include accent color code in the index.theme.
    It could be used to do easily figure out the color code so that we avoid
    hard-coding it in places such as g-c-c
  * meson: Only build default variant of accent colors if default is enabled
  * CI: Also include mate-dark variant when rendering icons.
    We don't want to avoid symlinks from being generated
  * generate-symlinks: Ensure that we don't overwrite already generated symlinks
    It means we're doing something wrong in our lists, so let's avoid it
  * generate-symlinks: Fix handling of some arguments
  * icons: Ensure we don't overwrite already created symlinks
  * panel: Avoid using symlinks of symlinks as source.
    This is causing errors as it depends on the symlinks .list files and we
    don't want so.
  * icons: Ensure symlinks are not pointing to other symlinks.
    While this works, it may lead to troubles when a synlink is supposed to
    be created by upcoming definitions, so let's avoid this
  * build-ci: Also run on pull requests
  * build-deb: Add git version to package
  * debian: Ensure gnome-shell themes symlinks are preserved
  * debian: Add pre-install script that removes dangling symlinks (LP: #1968405)
  * icons: Update rendered icons and symlinks

  [ Martin Wimpress ]
  * icons: Add panel icons for MATE Optimus, Diodon, Caffiene & Variety
  * icons: Make dropboxstatus-x.svg panel icons a red that is consistent with
    other "alert" panel icons
  * icons: Add symlinks for missing gaming input battery levels (LP: #1967854)
  * icons: Add gaming-input symlink mapping to panel.list (LP: #1967854)
  * metacity: Define the base button dimensions
    This is used to determine whether the image needs to be re-scaled when
    rendering on different DPI densities. (LP: #1967507)
  * metacity: Add window buttons to dialog window
  This ensures dialog windows will always have a close window button.

  [ Paul Kepinski ]
  * GS: fix fg_color of unfocused selected calendar day
  * GS: fix lock screen switch user button in light theme
  * GS: fix entries border radius (LP: #1967826)
  * Sync Gtk popover/menu bg with GS
  * GS: fix for entries height shift
  * Fix notifications shadow (revert to upstream look)
    * Move up notification shadow
  * Add ubiquity 22x22 size
  * Nautilus drop image preview border-radius
  * Nautilus fix selecte...

[Robie Basak (racb)]

This works for me. Thanks! Now I just have to look for the button circles to tell if I'm looking at an active window or not.