Make text on taskbar readable on light color scheme

[pbabinca]

Gnome 42+ supports setting color preferences: light (default) and dark¹.

When I set preferred color scheme to default or prefer light - either in the Settings or with gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme default or gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme prefer-light, text on the taskbar stays slightly dark grey on light grey background which makes text unreadable:

I'm running Fedora 40, Gnome Shell 46, using the default Adwaita theme.

After this pull request, there are two new settings to set font color of the application titles on light color scheme for minimized and not minimized applications in Dash to panel settings -> Behavior -> Ungroup applications -> settings icon:

By default this color is #282828 which is Gnome Shell's dark text on light color scheme² for .panel-button:

Footnotes

1. Some information can be found on Gnome Initiatives Wiki: Dark Style Preference. ↩

2. Since Gnome shell uses Sass to build up css and then gresource, the easiest is to query it like this:

   gresource extract \
   /usr/share/gnome-shell/gnome-shell-theme.gresource \
   /org/gnome/shell/theme/gnome-shell-light.css \
   | awk '/#panel \.panel-button \{/,/\}/ { if ($0 ~ /color:/ && $0 !~ /background-color:/) print }'
   

   ↩

[julienfalque]

Instead of setting it, can't the color be automatically inherited from the shell somehow? This already works for e.g. the clock or the battery percentage.

Note: this relates to #1978.

[pbabinca]

Instead of setting it, can't the color be automatically inherited from the shell somehow? This already works for e.g. the clock or the battery percentage.

I don't know if it is possible to automatically inherit the color as you are suggesting.

Dash to panel does not use CSS classes but rather sets styles directly based on other settings. See e.g. here:

dash-to-panel/appIcons.js

Lines 587 to 590 in 77ce087

	this._windowTitle.set_style('font-size: ' + SETTINGS.get_int('group-apps-label-font-size') * fontScale + 'px;' +
	'font-weight: ' + fontWeight + ';' +
	(useFixedWidth ? '' : 'max-width: ' + maxLabelWidth + 'px;') +
	'color: ' + fontColor);

With my approach in this PR I ended up with a fairly small change in the code base and environment that I'm not familiar with. I'm using this for some time now, it does not causes me any issues and I'm fine with this solution.