Introduction

Shows you how to change the font colour of applications in the taskbar away from the default black so that you can actually see the writing when you customise your desktop. The example illustrates how to do it for your clock but the method is sound for all applications should you happen to know the names of the widgets.

Editing the Configuration File

Using the default clock as an example, the font colour is set to be black by default and stays that way despite whatever the background colour of the taskbar is.

This change involves editing the gtkrc file associated with the theme that you are running. The default Ubuntu theme is Human (note the leading capital) so that is used in the example - your theme may be different.

As root, use vi or gedit or similar to edit,

/usr/share/themes/Human/gtk-2.0.gtkrc

by adding the following section to the end of the file,

#user changes for clock font colour
style "panel-clock"
{
  fg[NORMAL] = "#FFFFFF"
}
widget "*.clock-applet-button.*" style "panel-clock"

In this case the selected colour is white (#FFFFFF).

CategoryPreferences