[MlMt] Colored Messages: Styles.plist being ignored

[Pierre Igot]

Just want to confirm that the new system for coloring messages works just as well as the old styles.plist-based one. In fact, in some respects it has more flexibility and works better.

HOWEVER, there is one glaring issue that remains unaddressed in recent builds: when a coloured message is selected in a list, the selection highlighting colour is your default “accent” colour (typically dark blue), but MailMate does not INVERT the coloured text to white to make it readable over the dark blue background. The result is that, if the text colour for the message in the list happens to be a fairly dark colour, it becomes pretty much unreadable when highlighted. The only dark-coloured messages that remain readable when selected are those that are in BLACK. If the text colour of the message is black, then MM inverts it to white when selected. For all other colours, there’s no inversion. Only lighter text colours remain (somewhat) readable over a dark blue background when selected.

I have send an extensive post directly to Benny about this, with supporting screen shots, explaining why I strongly believe that he should bring back inversion for coloured messages as well, i.e. ignore the default accent colour and use THE MESSAGE’S TEXT COLOUR as background for the highlighting and invert the text itself to white. This used to be the case in order builds of MM. Then at some point Benny reversed his decision and went back to using the default accent colour for highlighting in the message list, regardless of the text colour of the highlighted message, with no inversion of the text to white in order to make is readable.

I would really like that all those other MM users who use text colouring (either in an older build via  the hidden Styles.plist feature or in more recent builds with the new smart-mailbox-based feature) indicate here how they feel about this defective text inversion scheme that makes it coloured messages hard to read when selected/highlighted. It might be a bit “slicker” and “cleaner” to have the same accent colour for selection highlighting everywhere in the message list, but it is at the expense of readability and usability. I’d rather have a mishmash of different selection highlighting colours based on the underlying colours of the selected messages, with proper inversion of the text to white. I find the lack of readability of non-inverted darker text over a dark selection highlighting colour background much less “clean” and very inelegant and user-hostile.

At the very least, Benny could bring back text inversion for selected messages using their own colour as the selection highlighting colour as an OPTION for those who use text colouring — which is now, after all, a fully supported (no longer hidden) feature in the MM user interface.

Anyone else agree?

Thanks.

Pierre



On 31 Jan 2024, at 2:41, Sven Klages wrote:

> Thank you Bill & Eric!
>
> Sounds good, I will give it a try :-)
>
> -Sven
>
> Am 30.01.24 um 23:58 schrieb Eric Sharakan via mailmate:
>> On 30 Jan 2024, at 17:33, Bill Cole wrote:
>>
>>> On 2024-01-30 at 14:32:34 UTC-0500 (Tue, 30 Jan 2024 20:32:34 +0100)
>>> Sven Klages <mailmate at lists.freron.com>
>>> is rumored to have said:
>>>
>>> [...]
>>>> When using smart mailboxes as proposed in the comments of your bug report, I do have one type/color per smart folder, that’s not the same … did I get it right?
>>>
>>> Yes, but I think that you are missing the fact that you can create a smart mailbox aggregating the messages of other (colored-message) smart mailboxes. The messages keep the color assigned by the parent mailbox.
>>
>> Right, all you need to do is create smart mailboxes containing the conditions you want for coloring the messages. Then, use the Mailbox->Color submenu to choose a color for that mailbox, and also select "Use Color in Message List". Your chosen color will be applied not only to the messages in your smart mailbox, but also to the original messages, wherever they reside.
>>
>> It's totally flexible and has been working great for me.
>>
>> -Eric
>> _______________________________________________
>> mailmate mailing list
>> mailmate at lists.freron.com
>> https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate


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