How to customize titlebar colors on desktop?

Support & Help Requests
#1

I have just installed Ubuntu MATE 22.04. I like it quite a bit and I am considering switching all my computers (laptop, desktop, work, and home) to this distribution.

The one issue that holds me back is the dearth of themes that distinguish between active versus inactive (focused/unfocused) windows by changing the colors of their titlebars. I see that the "Windows ME" theme does that, but who would want a Windows theme on Ubuntu?

Perhaps there is a way to customize the titlebar colors on active versus inactive windows. If so, then I would greatly be indebted to anyone who will show me how to do that.

#2

See Change inactive titlebar color, this might help. you could install mate-themes via synaptic package manager.

#3

Lucid at 2022-06-17 02-41-54
Lucid at 2022-06-17 02-41-54691×144 16.2 KB

Would something like that work for you? You can change un/focused colors to anything you want, at will, but I don't have the time to mess around changing the style for you.

Creating TraditionalOK Color Variants
#4

I found that the Clearlooks-Phenix is quite customizable as a gtk-3.0 application. I have adjusted titlebar colors for focused/unfocused to my liking. Works well.

I haven't been able to figure our how to change the foreground color of the titlebar's text. It is always white and difficult to read on a light color background. I would appreciate any advice on how to change the foreground text color.

#5

That's excellent. I can achieve something similar with the Clearlooks-Phenix theme.

However, the foreground color of the titlebar's text is always white, as seen in the image that you have posted. I haven't figured out how to change that to anything other than white. I would be interested to know if that color is customizable.

#6

Oh - I wasn't clear then:

$  ./lucid-recolor.sh 
Usage: lucid-recolor.sh <ThemeName> <SelectedBG> [SelectedFG] [ThemeBG] [ThemeFG] [TextBG] [TextFG]
Recolor Lucid and save the results as ThemeName

You can have any color you want for any of the pieces listed there. (Meaning it's possible to generate both TraditionalOK and TraditionalGreen from it, for instance, as well as "dark mode" versions of them, and so on).

But you're stuck with whatever I've chosen for the overall look of controls etc (hint: it's a copy of TraditionalXYZ with half a dozen bugfixes) unless you want to change them yourself, is what I meant.

#7

That looks like a very useful tool. Where do I find lucid-recolor.sh? It's not in MATE's standard repositories.

#8

You don't: it's my own theme, which I never cleaned up enough to submit upstream to replace the multiple "TraditionalXYZ" ones.

Unfortunately, the forum doesn't allow file uploads because of the potential for them to be malware. If you're on Discord, poke me and I'll send you it. The instructions, which you'll need, are:

Extract this to the .themes folder in your home directory. Open a terminal and cd ~/.themes/Lucid, then ./lucid-recolor.sh with whatever colors you want your theme to have. (The MATE Color Selection tool is the easiest way to find ones you like). Once that's done, select it via the usual Appearances item in the control panel.