Didier Verna writes: Why? I think the opposite is true. When you use a bevel to distinguish non-writable regions on the screen, you no longer need to use a color change to distinguish them. You can instead honor the user's global background/foreground color choice, which they may have made for a good reason, such as "reading black on gray80 text hurts my eyes." I didn't make all this up. The menubar, scrollbars and default face have been tracking -bg/*background all along. Widgets and text. I repeat, widgets and text. If the toolbar had been implemented as an Xt widget, it would have been tracking the global resources already. What I've been trying to do is make the toolbar not be an exception to all the rules. I find the "this looks ugly" arguments irrelevant, since you can customize specific colors to your liking after you affect a global change. You cannot easily restore the ability to affect color changes globally once it is gone. In fact, before the code changes I made, you could not do it at all. That ability is what I'm trying to preserve.