Assuming you are using Oxygen style.

Created attachment 56387 [details]
konsole tabbar

I'm not sure what you mean by not visually distinguished.
The active tab iis the only one that is actually attached to the tabbar, and has a larger vertical extend than the others.

We will not change the background color. It is one of the design choices of oxygen to render as little visual indication as possible on the background itself, but rather using glows and shadows, in a more "physical" way. (background of things in real life don't usually change color). 

Still on the active tab with respect to other tabs: that's the only one that does not react on mouse-over.

Created attachment 56388 [details]
Screenshot of my Konsole tabbar

Yes, I use the Oxygen theme.  I'm not sure how distinguishable the active tab looks on the picture, but the tab bar sits the bottom of my screen and it's very hard to distinguish for me the active tab from the rest.

mmm. Whats on your screenshot is definitely not oxygen widget style (see the screenshot I posted for comparison). 

Check which style you actually use in systemsettings->applications appearance->style.

my best guess is that the screenshot corresponds to the cleanlooks style.

According to systemsettings it's Oxygen, but I'm pretty sure that you're right and it's actually Cleanlooks.

But regardless of the actual theme I think that such a visual problem shouldn't ever happen that compromises usability.  Konsole uses tabs in a special way.  Most applications use a small, fixed number of tabs among which navigation is infrequent.  Konsole is the exact opposite of the usual tab usage scenario which should justify such a feature.

Please let me know what you think.

To be honest, I never ever used konsole tabs :)
I'd rather have my desktop cluttered with up to 20 konsole openned at the same time. At least this way I can check which one I want by looking at its content, rather than just a tiny truncated chunk of text at the bottom of the current window. 

This said, IMO the tabbar design is indeed not suited to accomodate a too large number of tabs. All styles will all break at some point: text gets truncated; arrows appear on the side of the tabbar (with no indication about the number of tabs which are actually hidden on each side, etc.) 

If the application, by design, wants to accommodate many many contents on top of each other, I prefer kate's way of using a list of all opened files on the side, which can be resized horizontally, so that one can read the full file name, which has a vertical scrollbar, and all in all can accomodate many more "tabs" without clutter. 

Side note: I have the same issue with the desktop's panel. 

Now, well, that would be a konsole design issue. 

And also: this expresses my view and only mine :)

Hugo: I can see your point and an alternative interface would be probably useful but I don't use that many tabs most of the time, only about ten at most.  But still, the lack of visual distinction makes me pretty unproductive.

I'm not sure whether noone is interested or everybody is busy with something else.  I don't wanna push anyone about this but I'm interested in the opinion of some key people.

Thanks!

Created attachment 57335 [details]
Snapshot of konsole tab bar with kubuntu default colors

I'm struggling with the very subtle visual indicators of active tab, too.

I use small numbers of tabs, not some pathological number. In the attachment, you can see three, one's running wget, the other has a vim session and shell in my Plugin directory. This is typical usage for me, a few open editors, mutt, a couple shells, and gdb. I can see easily what my tabs purposes are from the title, but which is active is hard.

I only noticed when reading this bug report that the tab size is a few pixels taller - that is not very visually distinctive.

Its also a slightly different shade of gray, but this is also not visually distinctive.

With multiple tabs, I'd hope to scan them visually, and see one is different - that must be the active one. However, in the snapshot you see that it demonstrates three different visual indicators in three tabs... and the most visually distinct tab is the one that's using the different color font, but that is NOT the active tab.

Hugo, you say you don't use tabs, but that's not a very helpful comment. Tabbed terminals are the cats pyjamas, I'd be using xterm if I wanted just wanted a great terminal, I'm using konsole because I want tabs.

In summary, konsole is clearly ok with using font color changes in tab titles as a prominent visual indicator, because it does when there is output on the tty.

I can see why that is useful, but I think wanting to know what tab is active is at least as important as the output state (something I personally can't recall ever caring about), and I'd like an equivalently prominent indicator of active.

I'm totally willing to take suggestions on how to change themes, hack config files, whatever it takes.  I'll even rebuild konsole (or change to another one).

In terms of time at my desk, most of it is spent using konsole, and thus shifting through tabs while I code, so what might be a minor irritation for occaisonal users of console for ssh sessions or system maintenance is a major issue for me.

Thank you,
Sam

I do wholeheartedly agree with every single words of Sam.  Every day minutes of my time wasted because of the lack of a strong visual differentiation of the active tab.

The HID should be respected.  Those rules are there for a reason, but sometimes there is an exception to the rule and I think this is one of those cases.  By blindly adhering to the HID, usability suffers in this situation.

I thought that KDE promotes lots of configuration choices, like configuring the background color of the active tab in this case.  I'm not that sure that this is the KDE philosophy anymore.

I'd like to add my +1.  This has irritated me for a long while, but only now have I found an open Bug for it.

I do coding all day long, with a maximized konsole with a bunch of tabs open.  I cycle through them with the keyboard.

It is very much non-obvious from a quick glance which is the selected tab.  Often it is really not obvious also from a long stare.

It's very disheartening this is closed WONTFIX.

FYI, I happened to have the same random idea a few weeks ago and made a primitive one-line patch to show the current tab in bold font in konsole. It is available at https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/104103/ .

As I have said, that is just an random idea and a stupid hack. Do not expect it to be commited. Nevertheless, you(I mean those who want it) are welcome to play with Qt Styeesheet to see whether you can come up with better idea.

PS: I kind of agree with Hugo on this tabbar issue. Konversation is another good example, which allows users to organize a lot of channels on one side (It uses K3ListView for that ).

Also adding my +1 to this.  This has annoyed me for a very long time.  Therefore, no, I won't just get used to it.

I often have 10-15 tabs open working on many different systems and tasks at once, and the visual distinction for the active tab really is not sufficient.

Is it possible to modify the theme file myself to implement this?

One extra note:  I have my tabs at the bottom of the screen.  I tried putting them on top, and lo, I was now more quickly able to find the current tab with a short glimpse.  This is with the _same_ theme.  So it appears to me that there is something with how our eyes look for the current tab that works a little better when the tab head widget is drawn at the top, but it doesn't work when the tab head widget is drawn upside down, like when tabs are at the bottom.

After a few minutes at that, I reverted to bottom tabs.  Top tabs just don't work with terminals, where the cursor is mostly at the bottom of the screen.  Tabs at the top forces a constant "look up for current tab" "look down for contents at prompt" long distance eye swift movement which makes you feel lost.

I'd like to +1 this. 

'konsole' works very well, and has features I really like (unlimited scrollback, the ability to copy input to multiple windows (and pick and choose the windows/tabs, the tabbed feature itself).  But like others here, I find myself spending way too much time staring at my tab bar to figure out which tab I'm on. 

I think it's ridiculous that such a small change, that would make such a big difference, that is being asked for by so many people (Google for 'konsole active tab color') is being ignored. How hard would it really be to add an option to make the tab more visually distinctive. It doesn't even have to be on by default. It doesn't have to change colors. It could stand out in a more "physical" way.

it is interesting to see that out of the three posted screenshots, only the first one is oxygen, 
and with respect to the other two, it is, I think, the one that has the clearest distinction.
So: 
- this is not an issue related to the widget style
- it has to be fixed by konsole

as already argued, tabbars are _not_ meant to have 20 squizable tabs with almost identical titles
hence wontfix.

Someone, please move that back to konsole if interested. This will not be fixed in Oxygen (which would affect _all_ tabbars, most of them working good enough already, for this special case only)

Hugo, you are right in that this is not Oxygen-specific. I was not paying attention to the product this was filed against. So the 'wontfix' makes sense.

But you're off-base with the number of tabs '...not meant to have 20 squizable tabs...'
First, you're assuming that there's no good reason to open a big pile of tabs. I've personally used konsole to open as many as 60 or so tabs in the same window, set 'copy input to...' all of the tabs, and used it in a pssh manner. For an ad-hoc job you have to do on a lot of machines, it's not the prettiest, but it works (or at least worked--konsole is harder to script than it used to be).
Second, you're assuming this problem is only a problem with a large number of tabs. It's actually worse with just two (as there's no consensus, you just have two tabs that look slightly different from each other). It's pretty bad with three-six tabs, which is the range I generally work with.

Anyway, I've opened a new bug as you suggested: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330252

workaround:
#  in your ~/.kde4/share/config/konsolerc
# or ~/.kde/share/config/konsolerc
[TabBar]
TabBarStyleSheet=QTabBar::tab { min-width: 2em ; max-width: 25em; background-color: #AAA; } QTabBar::tab:selected {font: bold; color: black; background-color: white; }