onelight lualine background indistinguishable

[zhengpd]

For inactive windows, lualine background is the same as editor background. Is it supposed to be like that? Should we allow customizing the lualine bg color via colors?

[olimorris]

I don't use Lualine so I can't recall how it looks. Reading the onelight file I may have made a poor design choice that makes it difficult to apply your own customisations. I'd be open to a PR to fix this

[anjos]

I'm struggling with the same issue. The issue comes from this line, which appears on every lua/lualine/themes/*.lua variant:

local inactive_bg = config.options.highlight_inactive_windows and colors.color_column or colors.bg
                                                                                         ^^^^^^^^^

The choice of colors.bg is not very fortunate since it matches the default text editor background, making the split bar for inactive sessions nearly invisible (when you :split the screen), as you already saw. To improve contrast in the easiest way, this could be simply set via a oneliner patch to that file, so line 32 reads as such, replacing colors.bg by colors.bg_statusline instead:

local inactive_bg = config.options.highlight_inactive_windows and colors.color_column or colors.bg_statusline
                                                                                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

bg_statusline is by default set to a darkened version of the background, so that would work all the time. BTW, it is also the color that is used in the active lualine sections, so that would make it consistent at this level. Slightly adjusting bg_statusline to a darker version of its current setting would improve contrast a lot, IMO, but that is only my own taste.

Plan B: If you dislike the theme setup for lualine altogether, you may still tweak the theme by noticing how lualine searches for the theme configuration when theme = "auto" is set on the lualine configuration - it searches for a file named lua/lualine/themes/<colorscheme>.lua on your runtime path (which I think by default includes ~/.config/nvim). So, if you create a file named ~/.config/nvim/lualine/themes/onedark_vivid.lua and set colorscheme onedark_vivid, then your file will be found first by lualine and loaded for that colorscheme configuration. Copy the original onedarkpro.nvim file to that location and override what you will. For example, implement the above change and test it.