Background

Windows (and by extension .NET, and by further extension Mono) has a color theming system with two main pairs of foreground/background colors:

Problem

The mod list looks bad in Linux with a dark theme:

• The grid header has black text on a dark gray background
• The mod rows have light gray text on a white background

Cause

Mono's DataGridView has some bad defaults for its colors; the WindowText and ControlText colors are switched:

https://github.com/mono/mono/blob/f0921fd850b0c8e61d5954fa71471189d2a55447/mcs/class/System.Windows.Forms/System.Windows.Forms/DataGridView.cs#L176-L177

https://github.com/mono/mono/blob/f0921fd850b0c8e61d5954fa71471189d2a55447/mcs/class/System.Windows.Forms/System.Windows.Forms/DataGridView.cs#L191-L192

On a standard theme, both foreground colors are black, so this is not noticeable. On a dark theme, ControlText is light and Control is dark, so the mismatch is very apparent.

Submitted mono/mono#10944 to hopefully get this fixed upstream.

Changes

Luckily the defaults can be controlled by applications; now we:

• Set the default cell style foreground color of the header to ControlText since it is a 3D control.
• Set the default cell style foreground color of the normal rows to WindowText to make them match their background

This fixes part of #2525 (we can't fix the menu or toolbar unless mono/mono#10942 is merged).

Alternate approaches considered and not done

We could try to make the grid background dark instead of white. This would be done by setting it to SystemColors.Control. However, this would mess up non-dark themes, making the control the color of a button.