Colors INSIDE of windows?

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, at 6:45pm, sconce at in-spec-inc.com wrote:
> How do you choose colors for the insides of windows?

  This is, unfortunately, one of the areas where Unix has trouble.

  The answer is, "it depends".  Specifically, it depends on the
toolkit/widget set/library the program uses.  At last count, there were
about 15 bazillion of these things.  The more common ones are GTK/GNOME,
Qt/KDE, and Xt/Athena/Motif.  Each one is different, and gets mixed-up
within as well.

> I suspect that a default is set somewhere, because everything seems to use
> the same color (a mild grey, rgb 216/216/216, which although not
> unpleasant, on my screens looks like a certain default theme used by a
> Redmond company).

  I call that color "GUI gray", because it seems to be the default color for
window trim on all GUIs except the Mac.  :)

> Examples of the components I'm after:
>    o  The "File .. Edit .." bar (e.g., sylpheed, galeon, dillo, mozilla)

  Those are mainly GTK apps.  GTK is kind-of part of GNOME.  If you are
using GNOME, you can twiddle the GTK settings by doing Foot -> Programs ->
Settings -> Desktop -> Themes.  If you are not using GNOME, you can look at
the $HOME/.gtkrc file.

  (Docs?  What are those?)

> I've done a lot of looking at X documentation, and a lot of googling, and
> a lot of probing of xinitrc, Xdefaults files, and so on.

  Xdefaults is used by Xt Intrinsics, the original "X toolkit".  New
programs tend to ignore all the neat stuff Xt could do, preferring instead to
re-invent the wheel in GNOME or KDE.

> Footnote - it's not the Xt switches, -fg / -bg, etc.

  Those weren't even part of Xt; they were a semi-standard convention
adopted from the "xterm" program.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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