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Citizen Snips

Member

Registered: 2020-05-06

Posts: 30

Help changing color of active window title bar

I am trying to change the color of the active window title bar by following the instructions in this post:

https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=11127

and this wiki page:

https://wiki.xfce.org/howto/xfwm4_theme

I downloaded the Greybird-Light theme and want to make the active window title bar a bright color, as the default theme currently uses the same title bar color for both active and inactive windows.  Per the wiki page, I added the following to the ~/.themes/shimmerproject-Greybird-320a703/light/xfwm4/themerc file:

active_color_1=#ff0000

I then went to Applications->Settings->Window Manager and deselected and then reselected the Greybird-Light theme, but my active window title bars didn't change color.  What did I do wrong?

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,000

Re: Help changing color of active window title bar

You can't actually specify active-color_1 in the themerc file. There are some settings in the themerc file that allows to to change the titlebar text colour, but if you want to change the titlebar background colour you need to edit the associated xpm files - and there are quite a few. The link you've referenced above discusses it in more detail.

Basically, you will need to edit all of the xpm files that affect the background colour (probably all of them). For example, if I have the right theme, title-1-active.xpm has the following content:

/* XPM */
static char * title_1_active_xpm[] = {
"2 24 4 1",
" 	c None",
".	c #939393",
"+	c #FFFFFF",
"@	c #DEDEDE s active_color_2",
"..",
"++",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@",
"@@"};

You'll note that the "@" symbol represents the colour "#DEDEDE s active_color_2". What this means is, the default colour is #DEDEDE, but if "active_colour_2 is defined as it is in GTK, it will override that colour.

In themes that specify gtk override colours, if you want to change the colour, you need to do 2 things:

1. remove the "s active_colour_2" piece

2. change #DEDEDE to specify the actual colour to use.

Again, as an example, if you changed the first 7 lines of that file to:

/* XPM */
static char * title_1_active_xpm[] = {
"2 24 4 1",
" 	c None",
".	c #939393",
"+	c #FFFFFF",
"@	c #FF0000",

...the background for that element will become red.

* You will need to do this for all files that define a background colour - which I believe is probably all of them
* You also need to consider the difference between the "-active-" (currently selected window) and "-inactive-" (background windows) files and how to colour them accordingly.

---

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Citizen Snips

Member

Registered: 2020-05-06

Posts: 30

Re: Help changing color of active window title bar

Modifying an existing theme is a lot more work than I thought.  Maybe it would be easier to find a theme that already has what I'm looking for:

1. light/gray colored taskbar and inactive window title bar
2. bright contrasting color for active window title bar and prelight/selected menu items, taskbar buttons, etc.

Do you know of any that would satisfy both of those criteria?

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,000

Re: Help changing color of active window title bar

Do any of these fit the bill?

---

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Magnus B

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2019-06-13

Posts: 12

Website

Re: Help changing color of active window title bar

Since GTK3 I have used Oomox to make my theme.
https://github.com/themix-project/oomox