Since the 2025-02-04 update, selecting an item in a Thunar window and taking the focus away from that window turns the item blank if the window has two or more tabs (but not if the window has only one tab) and on certain themes (as below).
An example of “taking the focus away” is right-clicking the item. (Focus goes to the context menu.)
Well, that’s how I discovered the problem. But just selecting an item and clicking another window will do too.
The affected themes are e.g. Cloudy-Grey (what I am using) and the “Matcha” ones (I get to themes in Appearance > Style).
Questions
How can I fix that?
One fix may be to edit the theme. I figured out that the theme might be in e.g. /usr/share/themes/Cloudy-Grey/gtk-3.0/gtk.css. If I am on the right track, which of the lines in that file would be the relevant ones? I wanted to cut and paste the lines here, but they exceed maximum character count. You may be able to see them here (in “Files” tab): Cloudy Gtk Themes - Gnome-look.org
Maybe I don’t edit the theme css, but create a separate file at ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css to supersede theme css. (See How to change theme font colors? or this linuxmint forum page or this Github page.) Here the question would be what code to put in so the “blank” is a different color. I see that it may involve two colors: foreground (letters) and background.
I am considering a switch to a theme not affected by the problem; e.g. Fluent and Fluent-compact seem fine. For these, however, I want to change tab color and active tab color (too similar, too bright). How could I do that by either editing the theme css (in /usr/share/themes/) or the superseding file ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css.
That was a great idea in principle, but when I tried the method there were too many hits for the color (I didn’t count, but may 30 to 40) and none of theme screamed out to me, “Hey, I am the one. Change me.”
Your solution to another post (as above) worked for me too!
But only sort of: that’s the color of selected item background for the active window (one with “focus”).
What would be the code for color for when the window is inactive?
I hope I am making sense. In case I’m not, here’s more detail.
Before your code: When I selected an item in Thunar, the item got a dark blue background. If I click another window, then that color became a lighter blue. (Theme in question: Fluent-compact, i.e. not Cloudy-gray as was used to generate the pictures in original post.)
Your code: I used #888888.
After the code: Selection in a window under focus is gray (as expected). Without focus, the color is still light blue (I suppose also as expected).
Also would there be code for the selected item’s text color? (A dark background color may benefit from a light text color.) This too would have separate code for active and inactive windows.
–even though I’d opened a gtk.css file and found this bit:
/*
base background color of selections */
@define-color theme_selected_bg_color #1A73E8;
/*
text/foreground color of selections */
@define-color theme_selected_fg_color white;