[Aptitude-devel] Bug#803980: Bug#803980: Aptitude text interface has poor color contrast on overall progress bar (when downloadng)

[Axel Beckert]

Hi David,

David Lawyer wrote:
> When downloading the orange progress bar at the very bottom of the screen
> moves slowly across the screen.  The letters on it are hard to read when
> the orange progress bar is from say 0 to 50% across the screen due to the
> poor color contrast of the blue on orange.

This is bascially https://bugs.debian.org/418361 which recently has
been closed as non-actionable.

The actual colors depend on the terminal aptitude runs on, i.e.
they're yellow (I usually use uxterm) for me unless I use it on the
linux console.

> The right part of this line is white on blue with high contrast and
> ones eyes expect this high contrast on the first (left) part of this
> line too.

I wonder if we could find a more suitable color combination for the
left part, though, with a higher contrast on all terminals.

> There's another problem with this orange progress bar.  If one has a large
> download (mine was 300 MB) and a slow modem (mine is 2.88 KB/sec) the
> orange part of the bar appears stationary and one may think it's a bug and
> shouldn't be there.
> 
> My proposed solution is to just eliminate the moving orange progress bar
> on the bottom line and keep this line with white letters on a blue
> background.  Since the % downloaded is clearly shown in white on blue,
> there's no need for a moving overall progress bar which is much less
> accurate to read than the numerical value in %.

I disagree here. IMHO the progress helps a lot to get a idea on where
we are with just a glance instead of having to read and parse the
percentage. I'd even say the progress bar is more important than the
actual number.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
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