Search area illegible with dark gtk themes

[beerfan]

The search field applies a light yellow background color when text is entered. It is unclear why this happens but when a Gtk theme with darker background colours and light foreground colors is used the entered text becomes illegible. The search field apparently uses the gnome system colour for the text.

I recommend not colouring the background of the text field at all. Why is this done? If that cannot be avoided then the foreground colour should also be set.

[Mika Wahlroos (mpw)]

I suppose the different background colour for a non-empty search entry widget highlights the fact that the application list in the main view is filtered, not full. In any case, if the background colour is set explicitly rather than letting the theme handle it, the same should also be done to the foreground colour.

Looks like the yellowish background colour is not set if the current GTK theme is either a HighContrast or LowContrast theme, but this still affects other light-on-dark themes.

Perhaps a better option in the long run would be to have a separate themable colour for such widget states so that the colour follows the theme, but that would require support from the widget kit (and the themes themselves).

The attached screenshot illustrates the problem. I've typed "foo" in the search box, but that's difficult to see.

[Mika Wahlroos (mpw)]

The attached patch fixes this by explicitly setting the text and cursor colours to black when the search box becomes non-empty. The idea was stolen from what was recently done in Rhythmbox (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=414699). I'm not quite sure if the secondary cursor theme should also be set to black, though.

[Mika Wahlroos (mpw)]

Guess I could confirm this since it's obvious and easily seen from the description

[Mika Wahlroos (mpw)]

I originally tried the patch with gutsy (where the screenshot is also from) but it also applies cleanly on current hardy.

[jpka (jopka)]

I also use dark theme and see this bug, in Ubuntu 8.10 it's still not fixed.
I think best (and fastest) solution is 'not colouring the background of the text field at all', as original poster says.
Do Ubuntu developers plan to fix it?
Thanks!

[Mika Wahlroos (mpw)]

The same bug is still in intrepid and also in jaunty. The earlier patch applies cleanly to both and works.

The remote bug watch link to Gnome bugzilla is not actually about this particular bug in gnome-app-install; rather, it was automatically added when I provided a link to a similar bug and solution in Rhythmbox upstream. The bug watch might give the wrong impression that this bug is going to get fixed just by waiting for upstream changes to flow downstream, so I'm removing the watch to prevent confusion.