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It's been years since I used GTK+ and the Gnome API, so it won't be 5 minutes for me. It will be 5 hours. It's 5 minutes for the guy who owns the app though.

The change seems simple, but the last comment reveals a bigger issue. In order to implement your good change, GNOME would need to create a new theme element. You can't just hard-code the background as grey since if you use a theme with grey letters, nothing will be readable.

That being said, there is another approach -- reuse existing themed elements. For instance, turn each section into into a tab:

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Section 1 |
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Items in section 1

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Section 2 |
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Items in section 2

Five hours seems like a tiny investment for something that you have apparently been harassing the gnome developers about for over a year :-)

Does that 5 hours for you include all the requisite QA that really needs to be done to verify that it doesn't screw up more than it supposedly fixes?

If you have serious experience in development with complex projects, you'd be more aware that those 5 minute changes often have much greater repercussions than you'd think, and you need to verify that you haven't forgotten something before you submit it into the great wide open. Something that can be added in 5 minutes without proper consideration and testing can have a multiplier effect in terms of all the things that no longer work as intended or expected, and this is multiplied by the number of users times the number of things it breaks for the users. If the QA is thorough, that by itself is not a 5 minute thing, and may take some unpredictable amount of time, due to ensuring that all test cases (this appears to be a highly visual thing that needs to be checked manually, making it that much more of a hassle) pass that are known, and taking reasonable efforts to putting negative tests into place: purposely trying to break things to see if they will break.

Stick to your editorials, and don't go presuming you can instruct developers on how to do their work, or that they should work on your pet project, regardless of how valuable you think it is. At best, this is merely an "enhancement" which is in the eye of the beholder (or in the case of FOSS, in the eye of the beerholder) and may cause more problems than it solves for others. Just for example: how deeply have you analyzed your suggestions for those with color perception issues? There's lots of standard editor themes that for me, even though I have no color perception problems from a medically verifiable standpoint, are horribly intolerable and useless to me, due to sensitivities, but then again, they may work fine for those that are some variation of colorblind. As long as others don't force me to use those themes, ok, I can deal with that. Have you verified that your suggestion is readable to everyone that may use it on the various rendering devices (LCD, plasma, CRT, etc.) and aren't just setup well for a single device? I'm hoping you can see that there may be far more involved than you think when it comes to making a change that affects a lot of people like this.

The screenshot you post isn't even of something that is part of Gnome...

Try posting the "bug" to the right place perhaps? Also, why are you using OSNews to publicize something you think is important, but which no one else really cares about?

The only good thing about SLAB is that you can remove it from the panel.