Launcher: text not visible in selection

[coxackie]

This is using Adwaita: It appears that launcher works well with light shell themes, but text becomes invisible in dark variants.

[mmstick]

@isantop I think our chosen font color isn't very compatible with Adwaita's dark theme.

[isantop]

I think I can fix that by simply removing the text color from the stylesheet, but we should caution that Pop Shell will not look good with any theme other than Pop.

[coxackie]

@isantop I understand that the priority for you guys is Pop, but it would be a great advertisement of the work that you do if you try to respect the shell theme, in order to be used widely. After all, you yourselves mention that you would like to propose this for upstream. A little extra thought here could take you a long way...

[coxackie]

by the way, this is with Pop-dark theme:

same issue, clearly.

[mmstick]

Not at all what I'm seeing

[isantop]

@mmstick If a user sets the Pop-dark theme from tweak tool, then it will still use the light-mode stylesheet, producing this issue.

[coxackie]

@isantop this is exactly right. By the way, a bit off-topic (but related to the theme and gnome-tweaks), installing using deb files the latest 5.1.2 version of pop gtk-theme, only Pop-dark appears as an option in "Shell" at gnome-tweaks, the lighter Pop does not appear (but does appear in Applications, etc.) User of Arch linux, as I mentioned, and I have cross-validated this issue with the AUR package maintainer. Can you also see the issue in your local builds?

[isantop]

That's something I'm aware of and is a side-effect of the current implementation of the build system. It's somewhat low-priority right now while we work towards the 20.04 release.

[coxackie]

no problem - as long as it is going to be fixed, it indeed does not feel like a priority. I mean, as long as it gets dealt with in time. You want people outside Pop!_OS to be able to use the themes, I hope.

EDIT: It appears that gnome-shell.css and gnome-shell-high-contrast.css are missing in the /themes/Pop/gnome-shell folder, and this is why vanilla Pop does not show as an option in "Shell" at gnome-tweaks. Should I open an issue at the gtk-theme repo?

[evanleck]

FWIW I just started having this issue as well. I installed arc-theme and a set of icons, tried them out for a bit, and switched back to Pop but now my launcher looks like this with the light theme:

It looks fine with the dark theme and I've tried changing the theme both in tweaks and the appearance settings.

[GaryBer]

It was happening to me as well but rebuilding using ./rebuild.sh a few days later fixed it. I am using the Ubuntu dark theme option and the launcher dialog does not seem to reflect that.

[GaryBer]

Text visibility issue is caused by any theme on Ubuntu that is not HighContrastInverse on Ubuntu 20.

[ptrm]

A workaround to make it work on dark themes with bright menus (like Ubuntu's Yaru mentioned above) is to force the choice of light style somehow, e.g.:

$ cp light.css dark.css
$ make local-install

Edit: this will render the search highlights illegible on actual dark themes of course ;)

[tobz1000]

I've just experienced this issue, not long after a fresh OS install.

I switched to light mode and the colours were initially legible in the launcher. The only noteworthy things I can think of after that were installing some system updates, and rebooting. After reboot:

I also have gnome-tweak installed, but I don't think I'd touched any theme settings.

[rmerren]

Thanks to all those who responded. I have not installed any themes or used gnome tweak to change themes--I was using the Light theme as chosen from Desktop->Appearance->Light straight out of the box (though I have upgraded this laptop through several versions). I switched it to Dark and now the text is visible. I hope this is addressed at some point, but (as some mentioned above) it is not a showstopper at all and easily worked around.

[aidenlangley]

This is now fixed for me - on master, latest commit is 1fddaa8953a6554a83038bb5662662eb761eb361. It's not immediately obvious to me how though. Commits between metadata version bump & now don't seem relevant to this issue.

Edit: I have recently removed tweak tools from my system.

[mmstick]

Could have been the change made for improving high contrast support.

[Guztaver]

Edit: I have recently removed tweak tools from my system.

So, i had been having this problem to 1 month, and i solved now. I download the "User Theme" Extension for Gnome-Tweak an change the Shell theme to "Pop Dark", and solved the problem.

So, the bug is that gnome tweaks doesn't change the "shell" theme.

[mds08011]

To expand on @Guztaver 's solution, after downloading User Theme Gnome Extension, I saw the following in the Gnome Tweaks "appearance" section. I am using PopOS 21.10.

This is what I saw with the "default" shell theme.

This is what I saw with after changing to the "pop dark" shell theme.

[tobz1000]

Switching via the "User Themes" extension has... changed the issue for me.

The "User Themes" UI only seems to change the colours of gnome-shell specific modals, e.g. the "Applications" menu, and the launcher. Below you can see that the launcher is dark, but my windows are still light. The text is at least readable now!

But now, the regular theme configuration panel under Settings -> Desktop -> Apperance seems to not control gnome-shell modals at all, only normal windows. Here I have dark mode set, but a light-theme modal:

This is fairly frustrating for me because I change between light and dark theme often, depending on my environment.

[Guekka]

Still a relevant issue. This is unfortunate, as pop-shell is great but this makes it very hard to use for me Using the default Gnome theme with no customization

[HazemKaroui]

Fixed this on Fedora by going to Tweaks->Appearance and changing Legacy Applications from Adwaita to Adwaita-dark. Only side effect is that all GTK3 apps turned to dark mode now.

[drscotthawley]

OMG so glad I found this thread! I have been just tolerating this issue for the longest time -- i.e. barely being able to read text, all GUI elements (sliders, radio buttons etc) being invisible and just having to guess at their locations. Downloaded the Tweak Tools and the User Themes and set the Shell to Pop-dark, restarted gnome, and I can finally read the menus properly! :partying_face:

[jjanett]

Setting the shell theme to Pop Dark does indeed fix the issue for the launcher, but it is starting to create issues on newer versions of GNOME, mainly in the quick settings panel. Im curious if anyone has found just some simple css to override the highlighted text color for whatever theme you are using? w/Pop-Dark w/ Adwaita This is on an arch install (boy i can't wait for COSMIC so i dont have to deal with GNOME anymore)

Edit: after a bit more sleuthing i was able to find a solution

i couldnt get it to take a local css override on the system, but as the comment says you can edit the text color on the system by modifying /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/pop-shell@system76.com/light.css as sudo, and change color .pop-shell-search-element:select{ color: #393634; } from #393634 to #beeef7 (as just one example, use what you like)