The background of dropdown menus is very dark on mouse over

[shhyou]

I am using light-mode appearance in system settings, so system menus and dropdown menus are in light theme. However, the dropdown menus have a very dark background color upon mouse over.

• OS: macOS Tahoe 26.6
• Racket: 9.3.0.2
• GUI Lib: racket/gui@f534929f1f77e7b49

On the left: the dropdown menu uses a dark background on mouse over. The same GUI component is also used elsewhere in, e.g., "Submodules to Run" in language settings and "Determine language from source" at the bottom.

On the right: plugin buttons have lighter background which would not make the labels invisible.

[shhyou]

Okay, this is probably a racket/gui issue, not a DrRacket one. These specific menus inherit name-message%, and they believe that wob? is true.

drracket/drracket-core-lib/drracket/private/unit.rkt

Lines 5600 to 5603 in 9448157

	(define language-label-message%
	(class name-message%
	(init-field frame)
	(inherit refresh)

I am using dark theme for DrRacket, but the system setting is light theme. Tracing down the code path, the label of name-message% calls (white-on-black-panel-scheme?) to determine color theme. It returns #t although the system setting is light theme; not sure if this function is affected by DrRacket preference settings:

[rfindler]

The implementation of white-on-black-panel-scheme? is platform-specific. The file mred/private/wx/platform.rkt is the place where that dispatch is happening (it loads different files on different platforms). The macOS implementation is here. It is not affected by the framework-level settings.

Generally speaking, I have not spent a lot of effort on the case where the OS is in light mode but DrRacket has a dark-mode color scheme (or vice versa) so there probably are some mismatches there.

I'm not sure what's going on in this case, tho; does that pointer help you see something that comes out wrong on your system?

[shhyou]

Aha, found it! DrRacket's language-label-message% class (and other subclasses of name-message%) specifically does this:

drracket/drracket-core-lib/drracket/private/unit.rkt

Line 5667 in 34c3672

(define/override (wob?) (color-prefs:white-on-black-color-scheme?))

and then name-message% doesn't use white-on-black-panel-scheme? anymore when drawing the label:

https://github.com/racket/gui/blob/4ea668861e2855def6e4bce94df248a06c21e9b4/gui-lib/mrlib/name-message.rkt#L203

https://github.com/racket/gui/blob/4ea668861e2855def6e4bce94df248a06c21e9b4/gui-lib/mrlib/name-message.rkt#L301-L302

Maybe using system settings instead of syntax highlighting theme would be more consistent?

[rfindler]

Ah, nice! It looks like this commit may have been a bit overzealous. I guess the right thing to do is to figure out which of those things are going to be in an os-controlled context (like a panel) and which are in the editor (which is controlled by the theme) and choose between using (color-prefs:white-on-black-color-scheme?) and (white-on-black-panel-scheme?).

I've pushed a change to that specific one now but there may be others that need changing.

[shhyou]

Nice--that fixes "Determine language from source" at the bottom for me.

Looks like those controls are distinct subclasses of name-message%. Including the one in #823 (comment), I see three others in #827:

File/Directory Dropdown Menu

Submodules to Run

#827 also tweaks two other text-field%s:

Always use the same #lang line:

Limit Memory...

[rfindler]

that's great! Thank you!