Darker headerbar for applications in light theme

[alternateved]

Prerequisites

• I performed a cursory search of the issue tracker to avoid opening a duplicate issue.

Checklist to make sure the issue is not on your end

• I have made sure that I do not have multiple versions of the theme installed. Only one version should be installed in either ~/.local/share/themes or /usr/share/themes
• The files ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css and ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css does not exist. (Backup and remove those files and restart any apps.)
• I've made sure that the issue did not go away by restarting apps or by logging out and in again.
• By running the command env I've made sure that there is no environment variable called GTK_THEME
• Dark theme not applied on some apps? Did you try to run gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme 'prefer-dark' ?

Installation method

• Tarball
• Repository
• Flatpak
• Source
• Other (Specify)

Description

Hello,

Thank you very much for this theme! It beautifully keeps things consitent with the rest of the libadwaita system.

Some time ago there was a commit that've changed how some applications headerbars look in light theme. For me it changed Firefox and Emacs titlebars/headerbars into slightly darker color. I've been reverting this change on my own system for quite some time in order to keep things consistent with the libadwaita, but for a while I was wondering: Is this change needed or is this some kind of a design decision?

The patch I'm applying:

diff --git a/src/sass/_defaults.scss b/src/sass/_defaults.scss
index dd8f14a..faed050 100644
--- a/src/sass/_defaults.scss
+++ b/src/sass/_defaults.scss
@@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ $_hb_fg_color: #2f2f30; // Similar to rgba(0,0,6,0.8) on the background #ebebed
 @define-color view_fg_color #{if($variant == 'light', $_text_color, 'white')};
 
 // Header bar, search bar, tab bar
-@define-color headerbar_bg_color #{if($variant == 'light', '#ebebed', '#2e2e32')};
+@define-color headerbar_bg_color #{if($variant == 'light', '#ffffff', '#2e2e32')};
 @define-color headerbar_fg_color #{if($variant == 'light', $_hb_fg_color, 'white')};
 @define-color headerbar_border_color #{if($variant == 'light', rgba(0,0,6,0.8), 'white')};
 @define-color headerbar_backdrop_color @window_bg_color;

Emacs decorations without my patch:

Emacs decorations after my patch:

The same goes for Firefox and most likely other applications.

OS and version [e.g Fedora 42]

Fedora 42

Adw-gtk3 version/commit.

242b7b8

GNOME version

48

Application name and version. (Note that minor issues with single applications have a very low priority.)

Emacs 31, Firefox 137.0.2

[lassekongo83]

It's a choice I've made to difference between headerbars/content and also libadwaita/non-libadwaita apps. On many legacy styled applications it looks more out of place with a completely white titlebar in my opinion.

Some applications like Firefox will have all white tabs and a white tabbar with only a shadow differentiating from what's a tab and a tabbar. Contrast wise that's really bad and it can't be fixed with application specific styles.

Related: #247

But I started a poll to see what users may want: #296

[alternateved]

I see, thanks for answering! I really appreciate it.

Yeah, now when I look it from this perspective, I can understand why that headerbar in Firefox or Chrome could be an issue.

That might be just me, but one of the reasons why I like Gnome environment (despise it's flaws) is the consistent look of different applications (when using mostly GTK) so I don't have to see that things are different under the hood. This is all thanks to numerous Gnome apps and also your theme! I don't mind continuing patching this it on my side, but I'm still curious about poll results.