spaceline favors mode-line background instead of evil-mode foreground for the foreground color of the window number?

[Mohsin Kaleem]

Description

I've been trying to customise my theme for spacemacs and have been running into problems with the window number shown in the bottom left of the spaceline. It's color is set to change depending on the evil state I'm in, however it's foreground color never appears to change. The segment gets its colors from faces of the form "spacemacs-MODE-face". If I change the background color of theses faces in my theme then that's the color that spaceline shows. If I change the foreground, it has no affect on startup. If I evaluate my themes buffer, then the foreground color does change; which leads me to assume this is a bug. As it is, the foreground color for the window number is taken directly from the background color of the mode-line face (something I discovered through trial and error). I'd like to ask we allow the evil states face to determine the background and foreground color of this segment, as the current way it works is confusing.

Reproduction guide 🪲

proving changing the states face has no affect

• Start Emacs
• press M-x list-faces-display
• navigate to the spacemacs-normal-face
• change the foreground color to something that'll stand out... like purple.
• hit apply-and-save.
• If you navigate to your scratch buffer and hit to insert mode, the window number should appear to be purple.
• if you then close and restart emacs, it'll revert to what it was prior to you changing the face.

proving changing the mode-line face does have an affect

• Start Emacs
• press M-x list-faces-display
• navigate to the mode-line face
• change the background color to something that'll stand out... like red.
• hit apply-and-save.
• Observe that doing so, had no affect on the color of the window number
• close and then reopen emacs.
• You should notice that now the window numbers foreground color is red

Observed behaviour: 👀 💔
mode-line background => winum foreground
evil-state-background => winum background
evil-state-foreground => nil

Expected behaviour: ❤️ 😄
mode-line background => nil
evil-state-background => winum background
evil-state-foreground => winum foreground

System Info 💻

• OS: windows-nt
• Emacs: 26.1
• Spacemacs: 0.200.13
• Spacemacs branch: master (rev. 8c0b8c344)
• Graphic display: t
• Distribution: spacemacs
• Editing style: vim
• Completion: helm
• Layers:

(yaml html ycmd auto-completion syntax-checking ruby javascript python c-c++ helm emacs-lisp git markdown)

• System configuration features: XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG SOUND NOTIFY ACL GNUTLS LIBXML2 ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS THREADS LCMS2

[Mohsin Kaleem]

I recently stopped using spacemacs and switched to using regular emacs. There this issue wasn't a problem. I can only surmise this is a spacemacs problem, so I'll close this issue.