said Felix Miata: | dep composed on 2017-07-30 21:17 (UTC-0400): | > Thanks to Slávek, I've just had the least-painful system upgrade in | > the (heavens! can it be?) 20 years I've run Linux exclusively. It | > wasn't totally trouble-free, but it was less awful than I usually | > encounter. | > | > But now I'm encountering a problem that is annoying: menus in Firefox | > and some other applications are reversed, white text on black | > background. | > | > Any quick and easy fix? Am running 14.04 on Ubuntu 14.04 (and | > preparing to revel in the new features everyone else has had for three | > years . . .). | | Which Firefox version from which source? Mozilla.org builds recent | versions using GTK3. Some distros still build some versions using GTK2. | The two toolkits depend on different theming.

54.0 (64-bit) from Canonical. It actually gets pretty awful -- for instance, the search box drops its little menu and that one is *transparent* with white text, making it unreadable. Additionally, several applications have reversed text and everything else is black background -- Settings > Additional Drivers from the main menu is one; particularly bad for me is that GThumb, which has no useful Trinity alternative, is also black with white text, which makes photo editing (my job) really difficult.

| I've run into reversed UI colors several times before, but always forget | exactly how to fix it by the next time it happens. I only remember | messing with GTK app theming to solve it.

Where and how might I do that? Is there a GTK control center app equivalent to KControl?

Thanks for your help.

said Felix Miata: | dep composed on 2017-07-30 21:49 (UTC-0400): | > said Felix Miata: | > | I've run into reversed UI colors several times before, but always | > | forget exactly how to fix it by the next time it happens. I only | > | remember messing with GTK app theming to solve it. | > | > Where and how might I do that? Is there a GTK control center app | > equivalent to KControl? | | IIRC, if you can't do what's required via KControl you need to apt | install additional GTK theming. Whatever controls Gnome/Mate users might | use I never install. Also, for changes you make in KControl to take | place you probably have to restart Firefox at least, and maybe the TDE | session..

In my experimenting I've managed to make things worse. In KControl there's a check box "Apply colors to non-TDE applications. I unchecked it and it did not fix the problem, but it did make menus in both TED and non-TED applications very tiny indeed; also the text in, for instance, KMail -- *all* of KMail. I quickly rechecked it, but it did not revert to the way it was before, so I now have tiny text all over the place. No fun. Still trying to figure out how changing colors in non-TDE applications should have changed the font size in pretty much everything.

On Sun, 30 Jul 2017 22:24:31 -0400 dep dep@drippingwithirony.com wrote:

In my experimenting I've managed to make things worse. In KControl there's a check box "Apply colors to non-TDE applications. I unchecked it and it did not fix the problem, but it did make menus in both TED and non-TED applications very tiny indeed; also the text in, for instance, KMail -- *all* of KMail. I quickly rechecked it, but it did not revert to the way it was before, so I now have tiny text all over the place. No fun. Still trying to figure out how changing colors in non-TDE applications should have changed the font size in pretty much everything.

I already written about that on this list long time ago. That checkbox is very badly named, the correct name should be "Apply themes to non-TDE application". It additional to colors it tries to apply fonts and ok/cancel order and who knows what else. Also, afaik, it only apply them on checking the box by writing to various config files, so if something also altered this files you have to uncheck and recheck it to reapply.