Bug#731392: gnome-terminal: text is invisible when "Use colors from system theme" is ticked

[Simon McVittie]

forcemerge 721489 731392
retitle 721489 gnome-terminal: black-on-black text with "Use colors from system theme" under non-GNOME
thanks

On 05/12/13 00:13, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> In Profile → Colors, when "Use colors from system theme" is ticked,
> the main text is invisible (black on black?).

This bug already exists and is marked RC; merging it. I think
your one-line title describes it better, though, so I'm
retitling the earlier version to something similar.

> Note: I don't know what "system theme" is. AFAIK, I've never chosen
> a theme, so that this is probably Debian's default. And I don't use
> the GNOME desktop, I just have fvwm as my window manager.

If you were using GNOME, the "system theme" would be the text and
background colours from Adwaita (black on white) or the selected Gtk
theme (which doesn't have UI in GNOME settings, but is in
gnome-tweak-tool), possibly as modified by accessibility settings
(high contrast/inverse video).

I suspect that the bug is that when some part of GNOME (possibly
gnome-settings-daemon?) is not running, gnome-terminal fails to
find the "system" theme colours, and instead of falling back to
some sensible hard-coded default (black-on-white or white-on-black),
it falls back to black-on-black.

If you display ordinary Gtk widgets (e.g. the menu bar at the
top of the gnome-terminal window, or right-click and look at
the popup menu, or install and run gucharmap) do you get the
correct theme-based colours? It should look similar to
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gucharmap_3.4.1.1_on_Fedora_17.png>.

Since GNOME's only UI to change the system theme is in
gnome-tweak-tool these days, I wonder whether it would be
worthwhile to mitigate this gnome-terminal bug by changing
the default to "don't use colors from system theme"?
Then this bug would still be a bug, but could be downgraded
to normal severity.

> There was no such problem with gnome-terminal in the past.

This might be a new bug in GNOME 3.8. A bug in 3.4.1.1-2
(#723721) was merged into #721489, but I'm not sure
whether that was correct; the symptom described is not
the same.

    S