It's hard to distinguish the modeline from the buffer text contents about solarized-emacs HOT 14 CLOSED

Altight

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I like the current soft look very much.. you can always create a child theme

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The active mode-line and the inactive mode-line have different backgrounds even now. This makes distinguishing between the too fairly easy IMO.

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For the active mode-line there is indeed a lighter background, but the inactive mode-line is hard to locate. See the attached screen capture.

IMO the thin box that encloses the inactive mode-line is not enough of a clue to avoid confusing it with the rest of the text. OTOH, I agree with @thomasf about the soft look, is is nice and relaxing. So I don't know what's the best thing to do here... maybe a darker background for the inactive mode-line (active -> lighter, inactive -> darker)

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I changed the inactive mode line it use an underline instead of box but with a more visible color instead..
Is this visible enough?

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IMHO, it is too visible (too bright) and at the same time it doesn't help enough to visually separate the stacked buffers.

Other than using an (slightly) different background (like you already do for the active mode-line) resorting to text attributes doesn't seem enough, because those effects are often used on some modes for displaying buffer contents.

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Isn't this a relatively recent change? For years mode-line was perfect. Now (40ff12a) the inactive mode-line is indistinguishable.

I might be confused, but wasn't there a mode-line border before? Now border is missing.

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Indeed. Reverting 618e36f puts the border back. I think it was good before. New users might find solarised mode-line a bit obscured, but I think it is a good and subtle design which makes this particular theme very balanced. If I could vote, I would vote for potting border back and making things as before.

On a more general note, given that this theme is there for quite some time and many people are very used to it, I think such radical changes should be made in a bit more careful manner.

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I agree about reverting this, will do it soon unless someone has an better suggestion.

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Thomas Frössman [email protected] writes:

I agree about reverting this, will do it soon unless someone has an
better suggestion.

Just as solarized uses a lighter background for the active modeline, I
suggest a darker background for the inactive modeline.

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The main issue with the contrast is that the active mode is roughly the same contrast (and perhaps colour) as the hl-line-mode background. Which is a bit confusing.

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bradleywright: I know.. I think we should move this into a custoizable option for low/high contrast modeline.. Even if stuff looks more or less the same as it is now I still prefer it to the heavier looking bg/fg inverse way.

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I have added an option for this now

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Looks good. Thanks!

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