On Friday 06 June 2025 14:01:54 Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
I have been hacking my computers since the 1980s. Hacking is natural to me. I never have been good at rolling over wetting myself accepting upstream defaults or design. While defaults tend to satisfy many users, I'm not one of them. Likely one of the reasons I was attracted to KDE back in the early days rather than the more restricted GNOME.
That said, I could well be overlooking something obvious that is not intuitive to me. I admit that sometimes I play the role of grumpy old man a little too well, which has a tendency of hiding the obvious right in front of me.
This is one of those persnickety problems that I'll have to keep revisiting with the hope that one day my mind is right to see the obvious. At the moment though, I don't see how the menu color can be changed without affecting the window background color in all other windows.
I ought to have said (for myself) that I have been hacking my own machines since the late 1980s, not the 90s. My mistake; dunno why, maybe old eyes, maybe I was just trying to remember which machine was when. I started with Commodore Amiga in 1984, then moved over to Macintosh Classic II about 1989 or so, then moved on to a Windoze machine about the start of 2000. At last found my home with GNU/Linux about 2006, and never looked back.
Until 1984, I was a handwritten manuscript and typewriter guy, and in some ways, I still prefer to do things myself, by hand. Writing is always better if one writes it out longhand first, at least for myself, because I am not tempted to go back and revise before I have completed my thought. Many more mistakes creep into my texts since I started using these machines. Still ... they do offer me the ability to transform that handwritten manuscript into a print-ready PDF, and with my experience in typesetting, layout, page design, etc., I can make it look exactly like a book straight from the publisher. (Well, they do seem to have a wider range of certain fonts available, but the differences are lost on the average reader.) So I won't lay an eternal curse on these time-wasting pieces of crap just yet; they do have their uses.
See attachments for screenshots of my own system. The color scheme may not be to your liking, but I think I know a way that you may use it as a clue to solving your own mysteries.
Apologies for the fuzzy snapshots of my menu and the Kmail screen; I had to take the photos with my phone, as ksnapshot will not allow me to pop up the menu and take a screenshot at the same time. (Nor, as far as I know, will any other screenshot application permit this.) The other two shots are a couple weeks old; as you can see, I was comparing contents of a hard drive and a flash drive, because I was backing up, and wanted to compare sizes.
Now, if you think that you could work with something like this, and adjust it to your own preferences, feel free.
I am sending a follow-up email right after this one, which I believe may be more to the point of solving your problem. (Just occurred to me, but you may still find the end results here, in the screenshots, useful for reference.) This will make better sense after reading the follow-up email.
Bill
