Text not centered and underline chopping off letters.

[mbrumlow]

First off, thanks for making and keeping this repo up to date. It makes my emacs look nice!

That being said I forked this repo a while back to make mostly color changes at first but I realized I had fix -- or at least made a few things better visually non color related. I was wondering if anybody other than me had these issues and if so would be interested in me submitting a PR with what I found to fix them.

1. The mode-bar never looked right on my system. The text was not really centered in it, and just looked off. I found the root cause for me to be underline and overline. After replacing the overline and underline on the mode bar with a box things looked alot better. I have attached images showing the difference for a inactive bar. Please ignore any color differences you see.

2. The same can be said about headers. Again, the fix was to not use overline and underline and just use a box.

In both images the propsized fix is on the left, and current is on the right.
This may just be an issue with my system and my fonts.

Let me know if you would like me to submit a PR otherwise I will just keep my changes in my private repo.

[mbrumlow]

Only now do I find the (setq x-underline-at-descent-line t) setting..

[mbrumlow]

Well I don't feel totally horrible because that setting does not fix it well enough. Headers did not draw a continuous line on the package list. So I still think the better fix is simply to use the box.

[thomasf]

The box doesnt work well either, I don't remember the details but IIRC one problem is double or maybe triple borders when header and mode lines are stacked which also looks weird.. Sadly Emacs does not provide enough drawing options to really make a great solution here..

[mbrumlow]

I did find the double/triple border issue, and was hopping the box primitive worked like a css box or something, but nope. My solution was to make the border 1px and the results (on the hte screenshots above) did not look that bad, as the max would be 2px which is the size it would normally be. But that is my setup, so I am not sure how it would actually work with other installs. I could not reproduce a triple border.

[thomasf]

It was so many years since I created these colors so that I don't really remember anymore.. Maybe the main problem is that you can't color a box with an individual color for each side, also interaction between active/inactive border might be a problem..

When looking on a situation like this it was problematic to not get lone between all the lines unless the only slightly stronger lines were the ones marking the end of a window buffer, if the same color appears at the top of the modeline it becomes hard to see where the fist and second window begins or ends..

A general low contrast look using a low contrast palette also doesn't provide much flexibility.