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Improve Contrast of Line Number Color #3387

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Merged
BeckerWdf merged 1 commit into from
Oct 10, 2025
Merged

Improve Contrast of Line Number Color #3387

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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion bundles/org.eclipse.ui.editors/plugin.xml
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Expand Up @@ -1077,7 +1077,7 @@
id="org.eclipse.ui.editors.lineNumberRulerColor"
isEditable="false"
label="%dummy"
value="120,120,120">
value="115,115,115">
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@mickaelistria mickaelistria Oct 9, 2025

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Couldn't we instead use a default system color constant instead, like COLOR_WIDGET_NORMAL_SHADOW_RGBA ? The OS usually makes good choice regarding accessibility. Relying on them by default would probably prevent current, and future, trouble.

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@BeckerWdf BeckerWdf Oct 9, 2025 •
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What's the value of COLOR_WIDGET_NORMAL_SHADOW_RGBA on the different OSes?

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@akurtakov akurtakov Oct 9, 2025

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The value depends on the theme used. One can run SWT's ControlExample - it has a tab that shows all these colors.

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@mickaelistria mickaelistria Oct 9, 2025

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On Linux it's 172,172,171 so actually brighter... But still, I don't think any color should be hardcoded, and we should instead rely on the OS, which may modify these values according to accessibility settings.

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@BeckerWdf BeckerWdf Oct 9, 2025

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177,172,171 is even worse:
image

So this does not help.

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@BeckerWdf BeckerWdf Oct 10, 2025 •
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Concretely, my experience having learned a bit how Gnome does its UI/UX decisions with real experts;

By the way: I was also working with a real (UX) expert from my team on that topic.

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@mickaelistria mickaelistria Oct 10, 2025

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let's agree on merging this one.

Let's say, I don't disagree on merging it. It's indeed not worse from the screenshot.
It looks like this color is not overridden by the dark theme. Have you checked it with dark theme? Should the dark theme color be adjusted too?

By the way: I was also working with a real (UX) expert from my team on that topic.

Then (out of curiosity), can you please ask them how come that this line numbers are a problem for other Gnome-based apps seem happy with a lighter color for line numbers?

Also, 1 other thing maybe worth challenging in the choice of color can be "why sticking to greyscale"? VSCode or Visual Studio seem to be using some dark cyan color and it looks nice, maybe the color is even derived from the COLOR_LINK_FOREGROUND system color.
That can be a good inspiration.

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@BeckerWdf BeckerWdf Oct 10, 2025

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It looks like this color is not overridden by the dark theme. Have you checked it with dark theme? Should the dark theme color be adjusted too?

I did check. It's overridden in the dark theme and contrast in the dark theme is ok.

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@BeckerWdf BeckerWdf Oct 10, 2025

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Also, 1 other thing maybe worth challenging in the choice of color can be "why sticking to greyscale"? VSCode or Visual Studio seem to be using some dark cyan color and it looks nice, maybe the color is even derived from the COLOR_LINK_FOREGROUND system color.
That can be a good inspiration.

I also checked VSCode. For VSCode there are a ton of themes and different themes do that differently. I also so that cyan-ish color but there are also themes that use a gresh-ish color.

I just wanted to stick to the "Eclipse way" and only make minimal changes.

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@BeckerWdf BeckerWdf Oct 10, 2025

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Then (out of curiosity), can you please ask them how come that this line numbers are a problem for other Gnome-based apps seem happy with a lighter color for line numbers?

What do you mean? You you please explain your question again?

</colorDefinition>
<colorDefinition
id="org.eclipse.ui.editors.hyperlinkColor"
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