[SOLVED] In dark Cinnamon themes, when using double panes in Nemo, the inactive one is white and text is not shown

[BrunoMiranda]

Hi all,

When I'm using some dark theme on Cinnamon (Adwaita-Dark, Mint-X-Dark or Mint-Y-Dark), if I use double panes in Nemo the inactive one is white and text is unreadable (I believe because the text is still white from the dark theme).

If I use a light theme things are OK but my eyes can no longer stand them and I'm happy on dark themes land, usually using the Adaita-Dark.

Here's how things look:

https://imgur.com/a/4DtIGod

If anyone knows how to fix this back to normal, good; but if anyone knows what to tweak in order to have control of the color of the inactive pane for a perfect contrast for my eyes, it would be even better.

Any hint on what to do to solve this? Thanks!

[spamegg]

Looks like your nemo is messed up somehow, maybe try sudo apt install --reinstall nemo

[BrunoMiranda]

Hi spamegg, and thanks for your reply and hint.

Reinstalling Nemo didn't help. I've also purged and reinstalled the adwaita theme but that was before I realized that this affects all dark themes, not just adwaita.

I wanted to purge Nemo and reinstall it, but it Synaptic wanted to drag Cinnamon along, so no.

By the way, I had a Nemo window opened as administrator and it's working fine.

It's some nitty gritty setting buried somewhere in some file, either in Nemo or in its interpretation of dual panes (namely the inactive one) when it's using a dark theme...

[spamegg]

If you messed around with some of the style sheets like cinnamon.css etc. you can get a fresh one from the source code on Github and replace it (making sure you have the same version of Cinnamon and Nemo).

When you mess with settings you should always write down exactly the steps you took to change things, and back up the files you modified, so you can change them back.

Personally I modify cinnamon.css files but only just a little bit, to add transparency to the panel and the menu. I back-up the original ones, and write down exactly which line numbers I edited etc.

[BrunoMiranda]

Well, I ended up solving it the non-orthodox way.

I have a mirror operating system for this kind of things, for emergencies and upgrades.

After locating every cinnamon.css file, backing it up and replacing it from the mirror OS, it didn't work.

I've created another user account and things worked out normally. So it was some setting in some file in my user account, I just had to find it anyway.
So basically I've copied and overwritten every cinnamon and nemo file from my emergency account into this OS and this solved it.
I'm sorry I don't know exactly what I did so I cannot give an exact report for others to follow.

Thanks for your help and hints, and you're right about making backups and documentation of every single change we make. It might be sometimes boring and time consuming, but when things happen is when you want to rely on your notes.

By the way, what eventually messed this up wasn't randomly editing files, I've installed KDE just to see how it is and after uninstalling it and cleaning the system something was washed away or messed up by KDE.
Nothing way too serious as I have backups and in a couple of weeks the upgrade path to Mint 20.2 will open and it might have solved this. But anyway, it's already been done. Marking this topic as [SOLVED]. Thanks.