I made a change - going from light theme to dark. I feel the change made my eyes much more comfortable. The theme I ended up using is Matcha-dark-sea.
Then, I changed firefox color setting to “use system colors” and “override color specified by page” = always. (Firefox is the program where I spend most of my time.)
I plan is to the similar changes to all the other program - make them dark using system colors.
There is only one problem (so far): The colors of normal text when reading websites now is bright grey on very dark grey. The same applies to programs like Thunar. I’d like to change the theme background color to be completely black, and maybe make the color of normal text a bit brighter.
I’ve got to the point of realizing this sort of changes has to be done by editing the theme files. Next I found that this settings most likely are placed in files called gtk-*.css - and there is a bunch of those!
Further on I read “Colors for an XFWM theme can be defined in the theme’s themrc file. If they are not defined there, they are picked up from the current Gtk theme.” [source: howto:xfwm4_theme [Xfce Wiki] ]
From this I get that what I should do to make the wanted changes by adding a line or two to themerc.
But here I came to a holt: What should that line should look like?
All I find searching is for changing the background of window titlebar, not the main area of the window. Does anyone know?
Hi @marli ,
I use Matcha-dark-sea , which I selected from SettingsAppearanceStyle and also the theme I choosen in Firefox is auto, from SettingsExtension and Themes.
I did not see any problem reading websites like the one you mentioned using Firefox or in Thunar.
I wonder whether you can change your Firefox settings, in order to solve your problem.
Yes, I can change the settings of firefox. I’ve tried the adjustments in firefox and they are perfect. So I’d like to make those color changes apply to all applications. I think that is the point with the concept of themes; make color definition apply to all applications. So the question is how to do that?
Primary; how to change the theme dark grey background for text area become black?
Secondary; How to make the theme light gray text color more white?
I might have found a way. It’s dumb, but seems to work:
Make backup of /usr/share/themes/Matcha-dark-sea/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
Open a window that has the colors you want to change
Open app ColorPicker
Use the color picker tool to find color value of the color you want to change
Use some tool or text editor to search/replace all/some occurrences of the color value the color picker showed with whatever color you’d like it to be in the file /usr/share/themes/Matcha-dark-sea/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
I’m not sure if this is a good way. There are more css files that contains the color values. I.e. gtk-dark.css in the same folder, and files in a bunch of other folders that belongs to the same theme. At first glance it seemed to be enough to edit just that one file.
Most probably this change will be reverted to default by system update at some point. A somewhat more permanent solution could be to make a script that will redo the changes that I can run after any system update. This will merge the changes with the updated theme.
Alternative is to copy the modified theme over to user profile. But that will cause the theme to not include updates.