Gnome Color Theme

Ubuntu does not install the high contrast themes for Gnome by default. One gets installed. I had to hunt them down in the package repositories. That kind of surprises me, but not really. I understand the idea of only installing the things you need on install. There was one of the high contrast themes. The inverse theme, think white text on a dark gray/blue background, which sucks for me because it causes my eyes to focus on the inverse sections of the screen and then when I get to software like the browser where the scheme flips back to black on white, I have to refocus and end up with a headache.

Color themes are a bane of mine. I remember fluxing with Windows colors until they were perfect and then getting board of them the next day. I had one color scheme of ambers that I called Scotch. it is the one I kept going back to time after time. Windows allowed you to change pretty much everything as far as colors in the GUI. You can really screw things up if you want. It is great. I have not figured out how to do this in Gnome yet. KDE is easy and more flexible. Gnome requires some other piece of software to really turn a wrench.

What I end up having to do is copy an existing theme and changing some attributes. Different versions of Gnome handle this with different means. earlier versions of Gnome just plane don't support changing the highlight color for example. You are stuck with the theme. Newer versions hat least let you do this which makes it much more fun to play with the themes. Still need to figure out what the Gnome theme editor is.

At home right now I use Clear Looks modified to use a green highlight color. The affects the color of the highlighting and the color of the top title bar. Green is a background on which I can read both white text and black text. This is important because Gnome is shit when it comes standards for handling font color based on the theme instead of just hard coding in the program as 'black'. The pale blue used normally in this theme for a highlight color is great if you have black text, but white text is simply lost. I'm probably going to use high contrast white on the laptop. It is just plane easier to use. I use a different theme on the server because I typically only access it through a VNC session and like to have different colors show up to remind me that I'm on on the local box.