Mint 18.2 colour adjustment: Solved

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rob1
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Re: Mint 18.2 colour adjustment: Solved

Post by rob1 »

Hm, through a search I found this thread. Hence, yet I know about a feature that has been stripped off. I understand its background, and appreciate the move towards GTK3. So I decided not to step to 18.1 (from a fresh 18.2 installation).
So I went to make make my changes in order to obtain a better instant visual distinguishability of active and inactive windows (as at least one forum contributor desired, too).

Yet, a long time I have been very happy with a quite ancient Shiki-Colors-Striped-Metacity border theme. Due to the missing color tab, adaptation to my favourite colour to 18.2 GTK3 was possible only by creation of a clone of Mint-X-Orange, which I renamed to Mint-X-Yellow. This kept the final behaviour as close as is the case with the standard themes. See screenshot - with thin yellow bar on top of the active window:
Mint-X-Yellow.png
Note that this clone does not invert the text colour (afterwards, I changed the text to brown).
As the screenshot shows, the edit work on the clone is done using meld diff utility. All SVG-graphics were easily updated to yellow as well. Only the PNG icons cannot be changed.
Most important are modification of three text files where "selected" colours were changed.

Question: In my last 17.3 state (on another hardware) I used Mint-X-Fixed because it not only presents a dark title bar, but also a dark menu bar (& white text). However, its source text is totally different compared to Mint-X-<Colour>. Can anybody tell me which parameter must be changed to accomplish dark menu bar? (there is "menu", but this makes the context menu dark).

Remark: It is a pity that so may individual Theme clones for different colours exists instead of one common base for all colours. But perhaps this is pending work, since current web icons are all grey-scaled, while the colour is defined in simple css. This could perheps open an opportunity to re-introduce a "color" tab at some time.
rickNS
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Re: Mint 18.2 colour adjustment

Post by rickNS »

Biggles wrote:
gingertom5005 wrote:I've just upgraded my PC to Mint 18.2 Mate and all works fine, no problems that I've encountered as yet. The one very minor irritation I have with it is that this version no longer allows you to adjust the colour of the windows borders etc. Is there a way I can do this? (I installed the 64 bit version).
I have discovered a way to bring the colour back to the window title bar / borders or at least a workaround, I'm using Mint 18.2 Mate so I don't know if it will work for the other flavours.

Bring up the Appearance Preferences window and select Theme then Customise. In the Customise Theme window under the Controls tab select the colour you want from the Mint-X range. Under the Window Border tab select the border you want, something different to Mint-X or Mint-Y and one or two others. Under the Icons tab select the icons you want then close the Customise Theme window, I stick with the default pointer. Save your theme and you've got coloured window borders again.

As this is a workaround I suppose it might get broken with a future update. It works for me using an upgrade from 18.1 to 18.2 with MDM still installed and the default 18.2 kernel. It also works in an 18.2 live session so that will be using LightDM.
This is not a work-around, nor do I consider the thread SOLVED.

For example; my favorite theme is Mint Y dark w. dust blue border, (I suspect it was the OPs reason too) the text is very hard to see in some text boxes, so you could use the "color" option to change the dark slate color of input boxes, to a more pure black (color tweaking is the point we're talking about) so the text was easier to see. It was a good feature. I just noticed this missing yesterday on one of my laptops.

Apparently it is possible to tweak the colors manually if you're so inclined, by messing with .css files. For me, like the OP it is NOT that big a deal, I'll still use mint Y dark, and if I need to see some text better on occasion I can temporarily switch to another theme.

Thanks Mint Team.
Mint 20.0, and 21.0 MATE on Thinkpads, 3 X T420, T450, T470, and X200
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Spearmint2
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Re: Mint 18.2 colour adjustment: Solved

Post by Spearmint2 »

Change settings in a Theme. I looked in dconf-editor and saw "inverted colors" available, and plenty of color selections in "mate-atril" area. Maybe something can be done in there. I use in Firefox the "Nightly" add-on for white on black and other color changes for "night light".
All things go better with Mint. Mint julep, mint jelly, mint gum, candy mints, pillow mints, peppermint, chocolate mints, spearmint,....
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