31. Color¶
Color chooses the palette, the set of colours for the whole desktop: window frames, buttons, menus, the Front Panel, the four workspaces, and every amadeOS application. It also chooses the icon theme.
The palettes¶
amadeOS comes with seven palettes:
| Palette | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Warm Motif (the default) | Warm grey with blue-grey title bars, the look of this handbook's pictures. |
| CDE Brocade | Teal and blue, close to the default colours of classic CDE. |
| CDE Desert | Sand and amber, another of the original CDE palettes. |
| Classic Gray | The plain grey of early Motif desktops. |
| Dark Slate | A dark palette, for dim rooms and tired eyes. |
| Halloween | Dark grey with pumpkin-orange title bars and selections. It goes with the backdrop halloween.png (chapter 32). |
| Christmas | Pine green with red title bars and selections. It goes with the backdrops christmas.png and christmas-santa.png (chapter 32). |
Click a palette in the list. The colour chips to the right show its colours; hold the mouse over a chip to see its name and value, such as Active title #4E7D96:
- Base, the colour of windows and buttons, with Sunken, Shadow and Dark shadow for the 3D edges;
- Active title and Inactive title, the title bar of the window you work in and of the others;
- Highlight and Soft highlight, for selected text and list entries;
- Text and Inactive text;
- Workspace One to Four, the colours of the workspace buttons in the Front Panel (chapter 24).
Click Apply. The window frames, the Front Panel and the open amadeOS applications change at once. Programs that are not part of amadeOS, such as Firefox or LibreOffice, keep their own look.
The icon theme¶
Under Icons, the Icon theme list chooses the icons of the Front Panel, the File Manager and the menus. The row below it shows a few icons of the chosen theme. amadeOS ships the theme NsCDE, icons in the style of CDE.
Your own palette¶
A palette is a small text file. Put it into ~/.config/amadeos/themes/<name>/theme.properties for yourself, or into /etc/amadeos/themes/<name>/theme.properties for all users of the computer, and it appears in the list the next time you open Color:
name=Forest
base=#B8C4A8
activeTitleBg=#4F6B3A
workspace1=#6B8E4E
workspace2=#8E7A4E
workspace3=#4E7A8E
workspace4=#8E4E5C
iconTheme=NsCDE
The Halloween palette is such a file too, /etc/amadeos/themes/halloween/theme.properties, a good one to copy.
Only base is required; amadeOS works out the edges, shadows and other colours from it. Copying the file of a palette that is already there and changing a few values is the easiest way to start.
Under the hood
The chosen palette is stored in ~/.config/amadeos/theme.conf, the icon theme in ~/.config/amadeos/icon_theme.conf. The window manager and the Front Panel also tell each other the palette through a property on the X11 root window, _AMADEOS_THEME. Applications built on the amadeOS library amade-commons watch theme.conf and repaint themselves when it changes.