I was going to make some suggestions upstream (GNOME Project). I searched on "Atlanta," since that's the window-border theme I'm using, and the most recent issue report on this is the following:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565241
Which went like so:
- In Dec. 2008, someone made a suggestion that I happen to agree with (and provided a patch to implement it).
- The patch was immediately reviewed and tentatively approved.
- In Aug. 2010, the contributor followed up to ask about the status. There were no further comments until ...
- In Mar. 2016, the issue was closed as RESOLVED/OBSOLETE.
- Inactive title bars should be some color other than the window borders.
- (This could affect other window-border themes as well, not just Atlanta.)
- Sometimes a user is looking for inactive title bars; the existing color combination (at least in the Atlanta theme) makes it hard to find those titlebars. They look not only like window borders, but also like many toolbars & menubars.
- A good inactive titlebar color (not tested by me) might be 1/3 (one third) of the way from the window-border color to the active-titlebar color; since the active-titlebar color is chosen separately by the user (System Settings "Themes" window, Themes tab, Controls option), this would mean a dynamically computed inactive-titlebar color.
- If that isn't feasible, then the inactive-titlebar color could be 1/2 way from the window-border color to black, or in dark window-border themes, possibly 1/2 way from the window-border color to white.
- Window-decoration buttons (minimize, maximize, close, etc.) should inverse-video (or something like that) when the user mouses-over them. This is especially valid because the current buttons in some window-borders themes don't have visible edges that would allow the user to tell whether the mouse pointer is over the icon when near the edge of the icon.
- Christian Persch wrote:In the Atlanta theme, there's always a vseparator at the start of the right-hand titlebar buttons, e.g. if you set the button_layout pref to "menu:close" what you actually get is [menu] [title] [vseparator close]. The vseparator is just unnecessary, eats up space and looks ugly. I propose to remove it; attached patch does this.