Where in KControl is the TDE panel menu color controlled?
I can change the panel color and background image, but my menu color is gray. How do I change that to black(ish) with white text?
I am not much into themes so an extra clarification or two would be helpful.
Thanks. :)
On 6/3/25 1:59 PM, Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
Where in KControl is the TDE panel menu color controlled?
I can change the panel color and background image, but my menu color is gray. How do I change that to black(ish) with white text?
I am not much into themes so an extra clarification or two would be helpful.
Uugh...
Total guess, but I think menu background is controlled in kickerrc with, e.g. "TintColor=24,25,29" (which should be the same as the panel background color). I use a small gradient image for the panel, so the menu then gets a color of its own.
It could also be in kdeglobals (tdeglobals). If I recall correctly (and I may not), the foreground text color is just that selected in general desktop appearance.
It has been so long since I picked through every setting tweaking a dark theme, it's more of a fuzzy recollection now than a firm memory :)
I've attached the image file I use for the kicker background - for what it's worth. (yep, still dated the original create date 4 Mar 2011)
On 6/3/25 11:10 PM, David C Rankin via tde-users wrote:
Total guess, but I think menu background is controlled in kickerrc with, e.g. "TintColor=24,25,29" (which should be the same as the panel background color). I use a small gradient image for the panel, so the menu then gets a color of its own.
It could also be in kdeglobals (tdeglobals). If I recall correctly (and I may not), the foreground text color is just that selected in general desktop appearance.
It has been so long since I picked through every setting tweaking a dark theme, it's more of a fuzzy recollection now than a firm memory :)
I've attached the image file I use for the kicker background - for what it's worth. (yep, still dated the original create date 4 Mar 2011)
Thanks for trying. :)
The panel tint color is in the Appearance -> Advanced dialog and is related to the transparency settings.
Background images may be used in the panel.
None of these settings are related to the menu color. The best I can tell, the menu color is controlled in Appearance & Themes -> Colors -> Widget Color -> Window Background. The caveat is this option seems to be a sledge hammer all-or-nothing kitchen sink approach.
Obtaining a dark panel is straight forward using different methods but not the menu color. I don't want any dark themes because that affects the window background color in everything. I only want a dark panel and dark menu like I configured in KDE. Possibly the configuration in the newer KDE and older TDE are similar but the different dialog layouts are confusing me. Possibly what I want is not configurable in TDE.
On 6/5/25 11:47 AM, Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
Thanks for trying. :)
The panel tint color is in the Appearance -> Advanced dialog and is related to the transparency settings.
Background images may be used in the panel.
None of these settings are related to the menu color. The best I can tell, the menu color is controlled in Appearance & Themes -> Colors -> Widget Color -> Window Background. The caveat is this option seems to be a sledge hammer all-or-nothing kitchen sink approach.
Obtaining a dark panel is straight forward using different methods but not the menu color. I don't want any dark themes because that affects the window background color in everything. I only want a dark panel and dark menu like I configured in KDE. Possibly the configuration in the newer KDE and older TDE are similar but the different dialog layouts are confusing me. Possibly what I want is not configurable in TDE.
Yep, we tried.
This may be worth a feature-request. For somebody who knows how the desktop painting code works, it shouldn't be hard to hook the menu display and provide a separate foreground/background color selection option. I've always had difficulty tracing where the separate elements get drawn through the code.
I agree with you, that the menu background is likely just the normal desktop appearance background color. The guesses I had were from looking though the config files at where the various menu elements were set. There is very little that distinguishes the kicker taskbar/panel settings from kmenu itself.
If you find anything in a stroke of brilliance, let us know.
On Thursday 05 June 2025 14:50:17 David C Rankin via tde-users wrote:
On 6/5/25 11:47 AM, Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
If you find anything in a stroke of brilliance, let us know.
Don't know if this will help at all. The solution is intended more for non-TDE applications, to get them to accept the chosen TDE color scheme. Moreover, it works great on some non-TDE applications (e.g., OpenOffice, Psi-Plus, PaleMoon browser), but doesn't work on others at all (e.g., LibreOffice, Firefox, Icecat, Seamonkey, and many others). This is for me a matter of legibility; I literally cannot *see* the fonts in most newer applications, because they aren't designed with older folks in mind. I sometimes get up almost nose-close to the screen, and still have trouble making out the names in menus.
For what it's worth, I have been using my same color scheme, menus, font sizes, etc. -- almost exactly identical, with only some tweaks along the way -- since KDE3 days, about 2006 or so. I created my own color scheme, examples of which you can find on TDE's screenshots page. I don't use any prefabricated themes.
Nevertheless, you may find that it helps you; if not to solve the present issue, then maybe somewhere down the way, for some other issue.
Search the Trinity mailing list for the heading "GTK 3 TQt Engine Styles"; I think that there are also two or three other threads on the same topic, under different headings.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/706528/qt-apps-stopped-inheriting-gtk-themes... https://web.archive.org/web/20201111174652/https://askubuntu.com/questions/7...
If you do go this route at some point, remember the last step, which is essential: sudo sh -c "echo 'export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct' >> /etc/environment" Then, if memory serves, reboot.
The instructions work for Devuan, or probably any Debian-type system.
Bill
On 6/5/25 10:51 PM, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
Don't know if this will help at all. The solution is intended more for non-TDE applications, to get them to accept the chosen TDE color scheme. Moreover, it works great on some non-TDE applications (e.g., OpenOffice, Psi-Plus, PaleMoon browser), but doesn't work on others at all (e.g., LibreOffice, Firefox, Icecat, Seamonkey, and many others). This is for me a matter of legibility; I literally cannot *see* the fonts in most newer applications, because they aren't designed with older folks in mind. I sometimes get up almost nose-close to the screen, and still have trouble making out the names in menus.
This is why I do not want a full dark theme mode. Dark themes hurt my eyes. Literally. Whenever I visit a web site with the idiotic "we are soooo freakin' cooool" dark themes, I react Pavlovian style by clicking the style switcher add-on tool button in the browser.
But dark color accenting works fine, which is all I want with a dark panel and menu.
For what it's worth, I have been using my same color scheme, menus, font sizes, etc. -- almost exactly identical, with only some tweaks along the way -- since KDE3 days, about 2006 or so. I created my own color scheme, examples of which you can find on TDE's screenshots page. I don't use any prefabricated themes.
I suppose I could say much the same. More or less the same $TDEHOME files since the KDE 3 days.
Nevertheless, you may find that it helps you; if not to solve the present issue, then maybe somewhere down the way, for some other issue.
Search the Trinity mailing list for the heading "GTK 3 TQt Engine Styles"; I think that there are also two or three other threads on the same topic, under different headings.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/706528/qt-apps-stopped-inheriting-gtk-themes... https://web.archive.org/web/20201111174652/https://askubuntu.com/questions/7...
If you do go this route at some point, remember the last step, which is essential: sudo sh -c "echo 'export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct' >> /etc/environment" Then, if memory serves, reboot.
The instructions work for Devuan, or probably any Debian-type system.
I already have qt5ct installed and running. Works nice with Qt5 software although a pity the basic code concept is not native in TDE code like the two GTK engines.
All that said, I believe the root cause of the problem is the color of the menu is tied to the window background color. Short of what David proposed with some new code to separate the menu, I don't see much of a solution. I tried yesterday fiddling with themes, styles, decorations, etc. I remain befuddled.
On Friday 06 June 2025 10:41:46 Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
On 6/5/25 10:51 PM, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
This is why I do not want a full dark theme mode. Dark themes hurt my eyes. Literally. Whenever I visit a web site with the idiotic "we are soooo freakin' cooool" dark themes
For what it's worth, I was freakin coooool before all those wannabe hipsters. Almost from Day 1, when I figured out how to do it (long before Linux, back in the late 90s, once I figured out how to hack my machines, I created dark themes, dark backgrounds with lighter text, in order to save my eyes.
This was back in Macintosh Classic II days, that big bad box (which is how it looked) with an 80 mb hard drive. And mine was actually an upgrade; just before I got mine, they were only 40 mb.
In Windoze systems, I have pretty much always hacked my programs to suit my eyes.
But dark color accenting works fine, which is all I want with a dark panel and menu.
I already have qt5ct installed and running. Works nice with Qt5 software although a pity the basic code concept is not native in TDE code like the two GTK engines.
All that said, I believe the root cause of the problem is the color of the menu is tied to the window background color. Short of what David proposed with some new code to separate the menu, I don't see much of a solution. I tried yesterday fiddling with themes, styles, decorations, etc. I remain befuddled.
I will ask the stupid question, which you have already tried, I feel sure, from what you say. But ...
When I created my own color scheme, I went through Trinity Control Center > Appearance & Themes > Colors I will assume that you do the same.
Then, I go through every single entry, piecemeal, don't skip any, and adjust the colors. Sometimes I fiddled round with it all day. However, that was just the first couple days or maybe weeks of KDE3, once I had made the jump over to GNU/Linux.
Maybe every few years I go in adjust the brightness or hue or whatever, to make it legible on different backgrounds, etc.; but I have hardly changed a thing since then, and have used this same personal color scheme on every KDE3 or TDE, across 3 or 4 desktop computers, and maybe 5 or 6 laptops; as well as portable versions of my machine, which I have installed on a flash drive. I keep all my old versions, too, as sometimes it's fun to revisit them, to watch how the colors change slightly through the years ... sort of like watching the leaves turn shades.
My guess would be that you need to go through that process again, step by step. Maybe you missed one? Otherwise, it makes no sense by comparison with my own machines and experience. I can change the menu color to whatever I want, and get the font in foregrounds to be legible.
Maybe you have done this already, though, in which case I, like everybody else, am stumped.
Bill
On 6/6/25 2:28 PM, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
I will ask the stupid question, which you have already tried, I feel sure, from what you say. But ...
When I created my own color scheme, I went through Trinity Control Center > Appearance & Themes > Colors I will assume that you do the same.
Then, I go through every single entry, piecemeal, don't skip any, and adjust the colors. Sometimes I fiddled round with it all day. However, that was just the first couple days or maybe weeks of KDE3, once I had made the jump over to GNU/Linux.
Maybe every few years I go in adjust the brightness or hue or whatever, to make it legible on different backgrounds, etc.; but I have hardly changed a thing since then, and have used this same personal color scheme on every KDE3 or TDE, across 3 or 4 desktop computers, and maybe 5 or 6 laptops; as well as portable versions of my machine, which I have installed on a flash drive. I keep all my old versions, too, as sometimes it's fun to revisit them, to watch how the colors change slightly through the years ... sort of like watching the leaves turn shades.
My guess would be that you need to go through that process again, step by step. Maybe you missed one? Otherwise, it makes no sense by comparison with my own machines and experience. I can change the menu color to whatever I want, and get the font in foregrounds to be legible.
Maybe you have done this already, though, in which case I, like everybody else, am stumped.
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.
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
On Friday 06 June 2025 15:18:00 William Morder wrote:
Here is that follow-up email.
There are some configuration files for themes and colors (extension .kcsrc). Here you ought to find what you need to configure your own Trinity desktop to look almost however you like.
These files, in the old KDE3, were kept in /home/<user>/.trinity/share/config/kdm
Now they are supposed to be in /home/marsyas/.trinity/share/config/tdm
I say "supposed to be" because sometimes I wonder how much legacy stuff is left over from KDE3, that maybe I still use, unknowingly. But anyway, that's another matter.
See attachments for some copies of my own .kcsrc files; you can compare how I have changed them slightly over the years.
I believe that the one that actually runs the show is this one: /home/<user>/.trinity/share/config/tdm/thememgr.kcsrc as everything seems to match up. The others are just for my own backups, so that I can easily overwrite the theme.
These .kcsrc files are what is generated when you change colors in TCC > Appearance & Themes > Colors That is, what you create manually, piecemeal, item by item here ends up as this file: /home/marsyas/.trinity/share/config/tdm/thememgr.kcsrc
I believe, with these clues, you can probably work out the rest yourself.
Good luck!
Bill
On 2025-06-06 17:18:00 William Morder via tde-users wrote:
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.
You can, in fact, take a snapshot of the menu with KSnapshot by setting Capture mode to Region and Snapshot Delay from No delay to >0 seconds. See attached (and sorry for the colour scheme).
Leslie
On Friday 06 June 2025 22:08:47 J Leslie Turriff via tde-users wrote:
On 2025-06-06 17:18:00 William Morder via tde-users wrote:
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.
You can, in fact, take a snapshot of the menu with KSnapshot by setting Capture mode to Region and Snapshot Delay from No delay to >0 seconds. See attached (and sorry for the colour scheme).
Leslie
I was wondering about exactly that possibility. I had not experimented with that feature of ksnapshot. I'll give it a try later.
It would have saved me some bother.
Thanks!
Bill
On 6/5/25 4:50 PM, David C Rankin via tde-users wrote:
I agree with you, that the menu background is likely just the normal desktop appearance background color. The guesses I had were from looking though the config files at where the various menu elements were set. There is very little that distinguishes the kicker taskbar/panel settings from kmenu itself.
I think a foundational challenge is themes and styles have not evolved in TDE like in other desktop environments. As much as I dislike full dark themes, the dark theme movement required developers to reconsider how all of this functions.
Design wise the menu and panel are connected, knee bone to the thigh bone. One approach is the menu background should be the same as the panel background, whether the user changes only the panel color or chooses a background image.
On 2025-06-06 12:50:41 Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
On 6/5/25 4:50 PM, David C Rankin via tde-users wrote:
I agree with you, that the menu background is likely just the normal desktop appearance background color. The guesses I had were from looking though the config files at where the various menu elements were set. There is very little that distinguishes the kicker taskbar/panel settings from kmenu itself.
I think a foundational challenge is themes and styles have not evolved in TDE like in other desktop environments. As much as I dislike full dark themes, the dark theme movement required developers to reconsider how all of this functions.
Design wise the menu and panel are connected, knee bone to the thigh bone. One approach is the menu background should be the same as the panel background, whether the user changes only the panel color or chooses a background image.
tde-users mailing list -- users@trinitydesktop.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@trinitydesktop.org Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@trinitydeskt op.org
Something I noticed while poking around in the Control Center Appearance & Themes => Colors is that there are some widget types in Widget Color that do not appear in the example window at the top of the pane. Also, there are no widget types for Active/Inactive Tab Background/Text; they are apparently using the values for other widgets, and so active tabs in Konqueror and Konsole are hardly distinguishable from the inactive ones.
It seems to me that the Colors module of the Control Center would benefit from some enhancements to make it easier to create non-traditional schemes such as the dark sorts.
Leslie
On Friday 06 June 2025 22:18:06 J Leslie Turriff via tde-users wrote:
On 2025-06-06 12:50:41 Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
On 6/5/25 4:50 PM, David C Rankin via tde-users wrote:
I agree with you, that the menu background is likely just the normal desktop appearance background color. The guesses I had were from looking though the config files at where the various menu elements were set. There is very little that distinguishes the kicker taskbar/panel settings from kmenu itself.
Just a quick P.S., dunno if it helps.
I took a quick look through the list of choices in TCC > Appearance & Themes > Colors trying to find whatever choice determines the pop-up menu color (as shown in my screenshots). And I did find something interesting.
Get this, the only choice available where the hue matches my own menu is called "Button Background"; I wouldn't imagine that a menu is a button, but maybe it's because users can click on the icon, and the menu pops up?
Anyway, that seems to be the culprit; which leads to the next question: What is the color of the text in the menu? Sure enough, it's called "Button Text".
You will no doubt want to experiment more, until you find your own sweet spots, where everything both looks freakin coooool and is also legible and useful. But at least there may be a start for you to solve that problem.
Bill
On 6/7/25 4:35 AM, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
Get this, the only choice available where the hue matches my own menu is called "Button Background"; I wouldn't imagine that a menu is a button, but maybe it's because users can click on the icon, and the menu pops up?
Anyway, that seems to be the culprit; which leads to the next question: What is the color of the text in the menu? Sure enough, it's called "Button Text".
You will no doubt want to experiment more, until you find your own sweet spots, where everything both looks freakin coooool and is also legible and useful. But at least there may be a start for you to solve that problem.
I confirm the menu color seems rooted in Button Background. Some quick tinkering with a black button background and white button text creates one butt ugly menu as well as affecting all button backgrounds in all other windows.
Possibly exhaustive experimenting might find a cure.
On Saturday 07 June 2025 10:02:50 Darrell Anderson via tde-users wrote:
On 6/7/25 4:35 AM, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
Get this, the only choice available where the hue matches my own menu is called "Button Background"; I wouldn't imagine that a menu is a button, but maybe it's because users can click on the icon, and the menu pops up?
Anyway, that seems to be the culprit; which leads to the next question: What is the color of the text in the menu? Sure enough, it's called "Button Text".
You will no doubt want to experiment more, until you find your own sweet spots, where everything both looks freakin coooool and is also legible and useful. But at least there may be a start for you to solve that problem.
I confirm the menu color seems rooted in Button Background. Some quick tinkering with a black button background and white button text creates one butt ugly menu as well as affecting all button backgrounds in all other windows.
That's probably why I settled on brownish backgrounds, dark greys, mostly with yellowish-gold texts; only a few are black backgrounds with white text.
Possibly exhaustive experimenting might find a cure.
Yes, I did say that (as far as I can recall) I spent at least days, maybe even weeks, before I reached my own color scheme. It has been a lot of years now, but that's exactly the sort of problem I was having: to find just the right shades, that work well in different places on the system.
You will notice -- assuming your system is like mine -- that some of the borders, e.g., in Kmail, as I'm looking at it now, are the same hues as that "button background" and "button text". There is probably no way except to go through and keep experimenting, line by line.
Those numbers in the thememgr.kcsrc file, e.g.: buttonBackground=68,59,51 buttonForeground=251,187,10 refer to RGB, I believe.
Bill
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Darrell Anderson -
David C Rankin -
J Leslie Turriff -
William Morder