From kde-core-devel  Mon Sep 17 12:37:19 2007
From: Richard Dale <richard_dale () tipitina ! demon ! co ! uk>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 12:37:19 +0000
To: kde-core-devel
Subject: Re: Temporary KColorScheme change - hard-code some state colors
Message-Id: <200709171337.19770.richard_dale () tipitina ! demon ! co ! uk>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=119003293408878

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. 

-- Richard