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mingleby

Member

Registered: 2026-09-18

Posts: 3

How to tweak Thunar 4.20.2 close-tabs button colour?

Hi Guys,

Recently upgraded from xfce 4.18 to 4.20, which also upgraded Thunar from 4.18.2 to 4.20.2.

On my old 4.18 desktop I had the following code in my gtk.css file to tweak the colours of the Thunar tab-close buttons, to make them red in colour:

-----

/* Target the precise close icon class structure inside the active tab */
window.thunar notebook tab:checked button.flat image.close,
window.thunar notebook tab:checked button.flat .close {
    background-color: transparent;
    color: #ffffff;
    -gtk-icon-palette: error #ff0000, symbolic #ffffff, success #ffffff;
    -gtk-icon-shadow: none;
}

-----

This no longer works with Thunar 4.20.2.

Is there an alternative which will work with Thunar 4.20.2?

Cheers,

Mike.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,704

Re: How to tweak Thunar 4.20.2 close-tabs button colour?

Hello and welcome.

It doesn't look like .close is a valid tag anymore. Try removing it:

/* Target the precise close icon class structure inside the active tab */
window.thunar notebook tab:checked button.flat image,
window.thunar notebook tab:checked button.flat {
    background-color: transparent;
    color: #ffffff;
    -gtk-icon-palette: error #ff0000, symbolic #ffffff, success #ffffff;
    -gtk-icon-shadow: none;
}

---

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mingleby

Member

Registered: 2026-09-18

Posts: 3

Re: How to tweak Thunar 4.20.2 close-tabs button colour?

Thanks for the reply... Appreciate the assistance...

I tried removing the ".close' tag.

Didn't quite work - the colour of the "X" inside the rounded square of the tab-close button turned to white, however the actual colour of the button-background was still 'transparent'.

I tried changing the background colour tag to red:
 
   background-color: #ff0000;

This resulted in the active tab close-button being red, which is sort of getting there. Ideally I'd like all of the open tab buttons to be a duller/pale red and then change to a darker red upon mouse-over.

Is there a list of all of the various tags and parameters that I can browse through?

Cheers,

Mike.

Last edited by mingleby (2026-09-18 13:48:40)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,704

Re: How to tweak Thunar 4.20.2 close-tabs button colour?

Is there a list of all of the various tags and parameters that I can browse through?

Unfortunately, not in a document. You can use the Gtk Inspector to see the widget tree and properties.

Whuch distro and what Gtk (Appearance) theme are you using? Maybe the theme is over-riding something?

---

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mingleby

Member

Registered: 2026-09-18

Posts: 3

Re: How to tweak Thunar 4.20.2 close-tabs button colour?

Thanks again for the reply...

I'm running Linux Mint xfce 22.3 (Ubuntu 24.04-based) with xfce upgraded from 4.18 to 4.20.

I have the 'Style' set to Adwaita, 'Icons' to Windows-eleven (I know, forgive me!) and Window Manager 'Theme' set to Windows10Blue.

It was all working fine under xfce 4.18, so there's a fundamental differnce between the two that's ignoring the gtk.css commands?

Cheers,

Mike.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,704

Re: How to tweak Thunar 4.20.2 close-tabs button colour?

Unfortunately I can't test that configuration. However, in thunar 4.20.10 (I trimmed down the snippet), this is what I see:

Is it possible that something else is corrupted in your gtk.css file and causing the glitch? Can you try with an empty gtk.css and just this snippet? (Note: you need to quit thunar and restart via "thunar -q; thunar").

---

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JmaCWQ

Member

Registered: 2022-12-06

Posts: 87

Re: How to tweak Thunar 4.20.2 close-tabs button colour?

I had similar issue to this a while ago with regards to the buttons, I ended up solving it by making a copy of the Window Manager theme I preferred and edited it to suit, naming it differently to the original in the theme's index.theme file.
I changed the .xpm images used for the buttons in the theme's xfwm4 folder to my own.
So far it's survived a few Thunar/GTK releases without issue, wish I could say the same for my desired custom theme 

Buttons Active:

Buttons Inactive:

Button Pressed:

Prelight:

Last edited by JmaCWQ (2026-09-19 05:53:12)