#71 Lack of focused-element highlights

[Anonymous]

Most elements do not adequately represent their "active/focus" status, e.g. if one tabs between elements, one cannot see which element one has selected!
- tabs: no support - one does not see the tab bar is active
- combo boxes: no support - one can't tell one has a combo box in focus
- buttons: minimal support - the highlight is way too soft

Options to customize the "glow" would be wonderful. Perhaps even the massive underline that Oxygen uses (very useful!).

Thanks for the amazing style!

[Thomas Luebking]

please attach you preset to give me an impression of your worries.

just for the records:
- the tabbar focus state isn't visible in oxygen either (reason: it looks crap ;-)
i'll try what inverting colors will look like

- the combobox focus _is_ displayed (it's tinted and/or framed with the focus color)
- the glow below buttons depends on the contrast between the window and focus color.

in case you're visually impaired, i recommand to use a sunken frame for the buttons, as they will then recolor to the highlight color on focus

(hint: try the redmond.longhorn preset, max.milk on the other side is not supposed to have much contrast at all ;-)

[Mats Ahlgren]

Uploaded to:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2944956&group_id=201276&atid=976907

Thank you very much for the information, after a (unfortunately long) while I was able to:
- locate the redmond theme in /usr/share/kde4-style-bespin/presets
- import it
- notice that it does have a pronounced highlight effect
- notice that my highlight --though brighter than 'button'-- was not that much brighter
- find the color that "highlight" corresponded to in the KDE color module, and change it

Now highlights are somewhat visible. Thank you.

I guess there a few things I would still recommend in light of this:
- I noticed that even if the highlight was brighter than the normal button color, even close and meticulous inspection could not determine a combobox or radiobutton was highlighted. It's as if there's a threshold over which one will not notice any change on focus, even if one has one's eyes squinting and glued to the screen. Is this a bug?
- It might be nice if the KDE colors were referred to in parentheses according to their official name, e.g. Highlight ("Selection Background"). Or perhaps even better: if Bespin allowed one to change those colors within the UI. I had a tough time finding "Selection Background" because the KDE colors are very ambiguously named.
- Even at maximum brightness/saturation, the focus highlight on radiobuttons and checkboxes and regular buttons is (in my humble opinion) hard to tell. I have decent vision and young eyes, but a high-resolution screen. You say the contrast depends on the contrast between window and focus color, which is true. But, if there was some feature to increase intensity (e.g. glow size and opacity) that would be great, since currently the window and focus colors are *extremely* different, and still the focus on those elements is hard to see [I changed the Highlight color from the presets I've linked -- now Highlight is a pure brilliant cyan-white]. I can see focused elements, but I doubt that others could if for example I was giving a presentation. (This is another reason why the underline of the Oxygen theme, or an equivalent, might be a nice concept to pillage.)

(If you'd like me to split this up into separate issues I might be able to do so.)

Regarding the possibility of inverting colors for the tabbar, I've unfortunately found the inverting colors causes a very jarring effect and turned them off. Perhaps one could merely --like the alternating background color in a list-View-- allow the user to say "Tint the tabbar background by [numberpicker:15]% towards [colorpicker:Highlight]"?

[Thomas Luebking]

there was a bug in the comboboxes that preventented glow painting for low contrast cases (should have only been the bg color shift to stress the difference between the glow and the rest)

the buttons are a problem of their own. in your color setup, there's no way to get a visual difference
the reasons are for one the low contrast between the button and the higligh color and on top of that the color shifts by the gloss gradient.
i painted a solid shape around them for testing, the buttons gets slightly bigger, but you don't actually notice a difference.
It olny works when the glow is painted on top of the button as for the embedded and sunken shapes... or with a different focus indicator