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

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2013-12-05 12:42:25 +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> 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.

Indeed, when I searched similar bug titles before my bug report,
I didn't notice this existing bug (BTW, in my case, the window
was not blank, but this is because I use lots of colors, in my
prompt, etc.).

> > 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).

Is there a command-line tool to get information about the colors?

I can see that the Gtk+ theme is also Adwaita.

> 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>.

It's different. The text under the mouse pointer remains black[*]
and the background is darker, thus the text is not much readable
(though not as bad as with the default Qt theme).

[*] but when there's an arrow (for submenus), the arrow changes
to white.

Same behavior with Emacs. With Iceweasel and Qalculate, the text under
the mouse pointer changes to white, but they still use GTK+ 2.

> 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.

Perhaps.

> > 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.

I don't see any color problem with Mutt, however I get lots of
garbage because gnome-terminal selects US-ASCII by default!

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)