Xfce Forum

Guisanti

Member

Registered: 2017-04-02

Posts: 1

How to improve bad-looking panel.

Hello. I have switched today to xfce and I don't achieve how to apply themes to bars/panels. Currently my main panel looks horrible and I'm using themes which should improve its appeareance but selecting "apply theme style" on prefferences doesn't look to improve it.

I'm using Hedera darker theme and I selected it on  "Appeareance > Style" and "Window manager > style" and also clicked on "panel > appearance > style (None- use system theme). Widgets look to change style, but not the bar itself.

Thanks for your attention

sixsixfive

Member

From: behind you

Registered: 2012-04-08

Posts: 579

Website

Re: How to improve bad-looking panel.

You are missing something on the GTK2 side(the theme depends on the murrine, mist and pixbuf engine.)

also since you have a blue highlight color, make sure that there is no other theme set in your ~/.gtkrc

also you could run a GTK2 app from the terminal to display its issues

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A monotone icon theme for Xfce
A dark theme for Xfce

rufwoof

Member

Registered: 2017-04-06

Posts: 2

Re: How to improve bad-looking panel.

I run Debian Jessie and switched over to XFCE a couple of days back (from LXDE). LXDE is moving towards LXQt and my guess is that LXQt wont be as stable as I'd like and LXDE wont be supported as I'd prefer. So the logical step was to move over to XFCE and so far I'm highly impressed.

I'd modified my panel to look different

(clickable thumbnail)

in part by creating a .gtkrc-2.0 in my home folder and inserting the following to that file

style "gtk-theme-config-panel" {
	bg[NORMAL] = "#000000"
	bg[PRELIGHT] = shade(1.1,"#000000")
	bg[ACTIVE] = shade(0.9,"#000000")
	bg[SELECTED] = shade(0.97,"#000000")
	fg[NORMAL] = "#729fcf"
	fg[PRELIGHT] = "#729fcf"
	fg[SELECTED] = "#729fcf"
	fg[ACTIVE] = "#729fcf"
}

widget "*PanelWidget*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget "*PanelApplet*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget "*fast-user-switch*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget "*CPUFreq*Applet*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget "*indicator-applet*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
class "PanelApp*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
class "PanelToplevel*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget_class "*PanelToplevel*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget_class "*notif*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget_class "*Notif*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget_class "*Tray*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel" 
widget_class "*tray*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget_class "*computertemp*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget_class "*Applet*Tomboy*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget_class "*Applet*Netstatus*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget "*gdm-user-switch-menubar*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
widget "*Xfce*Panel*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"
class "*Xfce*Panel*" style "gtk-theme-config-panel"

The only issues I've found with XFCE so far is the lack of a GUI locale changing support. Also it would be nice to have a option to override the logoff 'save session' choice that defaults to being ticked. Other than that everything working great (as is usual with Debian Stable - but likely a older version (4.1)).