Theme not applied to window close buttons on XFCE4
StickyDigit opened this issue · 10 comments
Just upgraded to 21.1 and was inflicted with the theme changes. Switched to my preferred dark theme with green things and realised the close buttons were still blue except in the "Appearance" window. Seems to be the same bug for all themes.
Also affects the legacy themes (which I'll probably switch back to 'cos I don't like yellow folders. Shame, 'cos I like the rest of the changes)
Illustrations:
Setting the theme, the close widget in the Appearance window does the right thing by turning green.
..but all other windows retain the blue close button.
Looks like the exact same issue as this: linuxmint/mint-l-theme#4 (comment)
Quite right. Sorry, I should have spotted that. That report seems to be closed, yet the issue is still apparent to me,
FWIW, I have rebooted etc. but I cannot see an obvious way to change the window border theme despite the fact I've used XFCE for a lot of years. Guess I never needed to. Anyway, since the close icon changes colour in the Appearance settings window, does it not follow that it OUGHT to change it globally to be intuitive for the user? Or otherwise NOT change colour in the Appearance window, but have a big fat hint where to change it. I'd vote for the Appearance window to work as it does, and for the close icon change to be set globally by it. "Appearance" should be a one-stop shop shouldn't it?
Testing this on a VM with Linuxmint 20.3 I see that the close icon colour does not change there either when picking another scheme. I hadn't noticed before as I was happy with the green, and had only changed it to mint-y-dark.
See this one as well: #406 It's in the window manager settings in XFCE. This is something that should be brought up with the XFCE devs if you have ideas of how to improve it.
What fun..
I just noticed Firefox follows Appearance, and I suppose a few others will too.
I looked into the WM settings thang.. The close button in the Window Manager settings window in XFCE has inherited the colour from the Appearance settings, and that sticks for that window. A proper pickle. So.. I set the theme in "Appearance" to Mint-Y-Dark, the Appearance window changes its close icon to green, text editor and many others stay blue... I open the Window Manager settings window and it, has a green close icon. If I set the theme in WM settings to e.g. Mint-Y-Dark-Brown, Firefox, xed etc, all get a brown close, but Appearance and WM settings stay green, following the theme in Appearance.
Not at all intuitive, and I'd speculate "clearly wrong". Both need setting the same to have ALL things follow the theme, bar the things that set the theme, and without doing so, some will behave, and some won't.
Maybe the XFCE4 devs should be pointed to this. Got some skin-side things to do now, so I'll look into that tomorrow if time permits, and update here to show I've done it unless someone else gets there first.
I was about to post this issue to XFCE, but I couldn't get rid of yellow folders with any of the legacy themes I tried. So I set up a test user (my home directory has been around a few years and may have some cruft.). Set theme to legacy dark in both Appearance and WM,, yet the folders are still yellow on Desktop, in Thunar, and on the panel. Picture below is after a reboot.
Would that also be an be XFCE issue, or is that some issues with Linuxmint themes?
This looks like a similar (same?) bug I have on LM Cinnamon 20.3. And i think I saw this on Mate too. This bug is many years old. I remember talking about it on the LM Design Team, on Slack, a few years ago...
I guess this is now solved on LM Cinnamon 21.x, since they are not using Metacity there anymore. (?)
Steps to reproduce
- On LM Cinnamon 20.3, in Themes (
cinnamon-settings themes), select Mint-Y for both "Window borders" and "Controls". - Now, change "Controls" to some other Mint-Y-<color>.
- See? Your window close button is still green, on all Metacity windows. But CSD windows are okay. This means the Calculator is okay, while Xed and Nemo did not catch up, yet.
- Now, change something else: "Icons" or "Desktop". Now everything is okay, all up-to-date.
Additional information
If i remember this old story correctly, this only happens where the Metacity theme gets a color variable defined in the GTK theme:
in /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml :
<constant name="C_button_close_bg_focused" value="gtk:custom(selected_bg_color,#92b372)" />
This bug would not occur if there was just an absolute value there, no color variable (selected_bg_color), just #ff0000 for example. That is, if i remember correctly. But of course, you don't want a red close button, no, you prefer green... :)
In Appearance setting of XFCE4 4.18 which has just been released, there is an option to tie the xfwm4 theme to the one set in Appearance. Being that 4.18 was only released 8 days ago, I doubt we'll be seeing it in Mint for a wee while yet.
https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_8.html
ctrl-f appear
..so I don't suppose there's much point reporting the issue of theme schizophrenia to the XFCE team, because they have addressed it for those who use the latest version. Perhaps a similar workaround could be patched into the Mint version of 4.16 to make it DTRT?
Now that I know the theme needs setting in two places, I'm not too bothered. I probably set my theme a couple of years back and hadn't needed to faff with it until yellow and blue were in my face. I've been hacking around in Linux since the nineties, and spend more time using bash than is probably healthy. The issue is more of a show-stopper annoyance to the normal "ex-windoze" or "never did computers" brigade who will not care why it's got to be set in two places, nor indeed will most bother to search for very long before they just call it broken.
I would still like to get rid of the yellow folders.
I would still like to get rid of the yellow folders.
Looking at your previous screenshot, it seems you are only changing the GTK themes, i.e. Appearance > Style. Try to change things in Appearance > Icons tab...
LM Cinnamon 20.3:
Window-controls-bug-2022-12-23_09.57.31.mp4
Metacity windows do not update instantly. It does after i change the icons. Check my previous #418 (comment) for the full story.
Nice one! That got it. So, I can have all new theme for most of it, and green folders, Joy!
"Style" tab then, means: Style of everything except icons which are in another tab, and window manager which is in another set of controls altogether. I can deal with that now I know *, but Joe Sixpack is going to just walk, and certainly not going to report it as 'odd'.
Maybe a very simple "Linuxmint master theme configurator" control could be contrived, to set a theme in as many places as possible for the current WM and DE, whatever they are, all in one click, instead of having to set it three places to see a theme properly. That would be more pleasing to Mistter Channel-flipper.
*(I probably did know this lot once, when I last felt the need to change it.)