Hi, new user here and very impressed with Manjaro so far. I especially like the clean look of the default theme with one exception: when a file manager window loses focus, the selected item becomes almost impossible to read. For example, here the Documents directory was selected when I opened Templates in a new window:
This is a trivial example but if there are lots of folders with similar names or many folders are selected (for copying elsewhere say) it’s really difficult to see what’s what.
So, is there some (simple!) way to adjust the default theme to make the ‘bar’ on the selected item darker? I’ve never been one for fiddling with themes so I wouldn’t know where to begin.
Disclaimer: I don’t use Xfce — I’m a Plasma user — but I suspect that you should be able to tweak the color scheme, which you should find in the System Settings.
You should have colors for “Active”, “Inactive” and “Disabled”. Look for the “Inactive”foreground color of selected items.
I would advise setting it to black — or at any rate, to the “regular” foreground color for non-selected items.
Thanks for this but I can’t see where to make such a change. The only ‘theme editor’ I see is Kvantum Manager which doesn’t look like what I need.
@j8a Thank you but that is just a theme selector as far as I can see (I’d already taken a look at all of them in case there was something close without this issue), there doesn’t seem to be a way to tweak the selected theme.
Maybe I can find the theme files and modify them directly?
I found the theme files in /usr/share/themes/Matcha-sea/. I tried editing the resource file ‘themerc’ in the /xfwm4 subdirectory (rather than one of the css files in the other folders) setting ‘inactive_text_shadow_color’ to a dark value but that didn’t work (logged out and back in).
The other subdirs in there relate to other window managers or GTK 2/3/4/applications. Thunar appears to be GTK3 based so I took a look at the two css files in that folder but it wasn’t obvious what I should edit.
No, kvantum is specific to qt-based applications only. Xfce is gtk-based.
Never edit anything under the /usr hierarchy. Your user’s gtk themes will be installed under ~/.themes, possibly with some settings under ~/.config and/or ~/.local/share.
‘inactive_text_shadow_color’ is probably the wrong one to edit.
Thanks for the reply. There’s no .themes directory in my home folder (I guess because I haven’t modified or added a theme yet). There’s nothing under /home/paul/.config/xfce4/ which mentions ‘theme’ and similarly, nothing below ~/.local seems relevant.
It’s not a massive issue and I can certainly live with it until I can devote more time to finding a solution. Thanks for your help
Another user reported a similar issue with thunar gtk3.0 theme recently. Their solution was to create a CSS snippet in home folder to change one CSS selector
Perfect, thank you very much! I set the color to black - there’s clearly some transparency in use as it comes out mid-grey in practice but this fix makes the text perfectly legible.
Just to note: the problem wasn’t that the item which had lost focus was completely ‘blank’, it was just white text on a very pale background.
