[Pan-users] Re: How to set background color?

[Duncan]

Dr. Adrian Wrigley posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Tue, 04 Nov 2003 23:17:28 +0000:

> I have been trying to set the background color for the pan panes.
> 
> The preferences window has color settings for the text, but not the
> background. Presumably I need to do something with a gtk theme? or a .rc
> file? or X resources? Can someone point me in the right direction - my
> eyes burn up staring into the brilliant white I get at the moment.
> 
> I run Sawfish/XFree86/Linux/etc.

This is one reason why my desktop (save for PAN) is KDE based rather than
Gnome/GTK based.. KDE makes it easy to change individual interface colors
directly from the GUI -- getting low grades on usability from Eugenia and
friends over at OSNews in the process, due to all the stuff they let folks
change and the proliferation of customization controls that means -- while
GTK/Gnome seems to think ordinary mortal users that don't want to go
mucking about in config files directly should be content with pre-created
themes.  I'm sorry, but until the individual interface colors can be
chosen by the user as desired, I simply CANNOT consider the Gnome/GTK
desktop anything more than a fascinating toy, to play with a bit, and then
go back to WORK when I get tired of not being able to fix the colors to
something I can actually work with.

As you suggested, it's a gtk theme..  The easiest way to change it,
therefore, is to install full Gnome if you don't have it, and use their
theme applet (part of gnome-control-center, at least here on Mandrake).

What I did, instead, was start with my chosen KDE color-scheme as
specifically laid out by me in a way that I can't do with Gnome (grrr!!!),
check the box that says use the same scheme for GTK/Gnome apps, then go
find the files and hand modify them as necessary.  Here, they are the
~/.gtkrc* files.  I have several of them, one for 1.x, one for 2.x, and
the KDE exported one.  What little I've done with them by hand has been
mostly trial and error.  I think there were general system ones that user
settings were inherited from if not changed in the user ones, but I can't
find them now, so..

That should at least point you in the right direction.  I was able to get
pane backgrounds to a FAR more usable (for me) black, with a bit of hand
munging of the config files, and KDE allowed me to set the menus and
window trim to something approaching the KDE colors (a sort of toned down
cyan, here), but of course without the fancy alpha-blending effects of
keramik, my chosen KDE style.

The biggest trouble I've had with the black background is that unlike KDE,
which seems to set the text caret automatically to contrast with the
background, so with a black text edit area it automatically goes white,
Gnome/GTK doesn't seem to do that.  Either the text insertion caret is
always black, or at least I've never figured out where to set it, and it
defaulted to black.  Thus, I can't see it on the now black background, and
I sometimes have to use select to figure out where I'm at, or simply click
where I want to move, and start typing, rather than using the keyboard to
move there as I would if I could see where the insertion point was. Still,
I can live with that far better than I can live with a light background,
so..

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin