No visual feedback (focus borders) when using keyboard navigation

[linuxmint]

No visual feedback (focus borders) when using keyboard navigation

[Yanpas]

What do yo mean by visual navigation? Can you provide steps to reproduce and screenshots?

[Piiit]

As you can see in these two screenshots, there is no visual feedback while navigating with the keyboard over the config-menu of gedit with Mint-X. When I press 2 times TABULATOR I do not know where I am on the menus. However, when I do the same with Adwaita I have a border around "Zeilennummern einfügen". This is really important to me, because to be fast I like to use keyboard navigation with such dialogs.

With MintX theme:

With Adwaita theme:

I hope that helps. Otherwise just drop another comment...

Cheers!

[Yanpas]

the good news, I've found a solution:

You should midify this file /usr/share/themes/Mint-X/gtk-2.0/styles/buttons.rc, focus function (scroll to the bottom)

image
        {
            function = FOCUS
            shadow = IN
        }

the bad news:

• ugly dotted border appears everywhere
• this won't work in gtk3 apps
• moreover this theme support is ended due to Mint 18 will be using new themes.

PS: maybe dropping pixmap engine is good idea, murrine engine seems for me to be more flexible

[JosephMcc]

Not having the focus borders is a design decision. They were removed on purpose though I understand why some people want them.

While new themes are being looked at for Mint18 they are meant to be in addition to Mint-X. I'm currently already in the process of updating it for gtk3.18.

@Yanpas in most ways the pixmap engine is far more flexible than the murrine engine, just not as simple to work with.

[Yanpas]

It's a pitty to hear. Hope theme in 18 will highlight entries. In my opinion theme must not deprive user of any possibilities in favor of beaty.

[Piiit]

@Yanpas I have the same opinion. I think keyboard navigation without these highlighting borders is really limited. To my understanding design decisions must have a lower priority than reducing functionality. I see that dotted lines are not beautiful, maybe we can find another solution in design. However, I think that this is a minor problem. Not to know where the focus is currently, is a bug or a missing feature at least.

Maybe we could just say that Mint-X did not have any borders, also in the future, but new themes should have them...

ps. @Yanpas Thanks for the workaround...

[Piiit]

We have these borders now in Mint-Y, since there are no plans to introduce them in Mint-X too, we can close this issue.