With Backdrop Style Manager, this is probably the most important theme tool in (Ns)CDE. This tool
applies colors to the widgets, menus, applications and backdrops. As in CDE,
it reads color information from the palette files in
/usr/local/share/nscde/palettes
and
$FVWM_USERDIR/palettes
. Palettes are the 16bpp
color definitions (8 of them). This colors and border bg/fg/sel colors
calculated from them are the base of the look of pretty much all of the things
on the screen. Colors can be applied in 4 or 8 colors mode. Most notable
palettes are Broica in 8-colors mode and Solaris
(called Default on SunOS) in 4 colors mode.
Color Style Manager as most tools is written in FvwmScript with background shell helper and color calculation and generator routines. Visually it tries to be as much as possible similar to the original CDE, but since it has some new features, there are some new buttons and commands introduced. Tool has a list of the palettes (system + user), preview button which can temporary apply some palette on the current workspace backdrop and FVWM based applications (FrontPanel, other scripts ...)
As in Backdrop Style Manager there are $FVWM_USERDIR/palettes
and applied immediately.
Button /usr/local/bin
.
If action is not but , selected color will
be modified and new palette with generic name "Custom" created immediately. When finishing theme
selection in Color Style Manager with modified colors, Color Style Manager will ask for a name
of the new palette. The suggested default is "Custom" but on the subsequent modification, this is
the palette which will be modified and past modifications will be effectively lost. For that
reason, it is probably a good idea to save modified palette as new palette with some other name.
In that way, it can be temporary changed for some other and turned back again later. This
color modification dialog actually serves as palette creator (based on previous palettes) and
editor.
There are 8 spaces with colors from the currently selected palette (4 spaces in 4-color mode) and generated XPM file with all 40 colors displayed. Button
calls transient window where user can select 4 or 8 color mode. System default on modern desktop is 8.What is most important new feature in Color Style Manager are integration options. This are:
Own currently used backdrop synchronization (default)
X resources in $FVWM_USERDIR/Xdefaults
(default)
GTK2 (default)
GTK3 (default)
Qt4 (default)
Qt5 (default)
User's $FVWM_USERDIR/libexec/colormgr.local
script if exists, called with
the path of the applied palette and number of colors.
The last integration is used to integrate what default widget integrations
cannot reach. For example Gkrellm skin or some terminal preferences.
Qt/Qt5 integration is easy, since this toolkits can use their GTK engine to
integrate self with GTK theme. All that Color Style Manager has to do is to
define GTK engine in ~/.config/Trolltech.conf
and
~/.config/qt5ct/qt5ct.conf
for colors from the new palette to be used.
GTK2 and GTK3 are heavy work part. Here, we are using work derived from one
CDE theme for XFCE desktop and GTK2 + GTK3, purified and adapted for NsCDE
(see Section 21, “Credits”).
This is written in python. If turned on, this will produce
$HOME/.themes/NsCDE
directory with the theme for GTK2 and GTK3, and will edit $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0
and
$HOME/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
to put or change
gtk-theme-name
value. If NsCDE palette with dark background 4 color is choosen,
Color Style Manager will put gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme
into
$HOME/.gtkrc-2.0
and $HOME/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
. If
palette with light color 4 (used for text areas and text fields usually) is choosen, that variable
will be removed from the both configuration files. When switching off from NsCDE to some other
environment, care must be taken manually to handle gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme
in configuration files if last palette in NsCDE was using dark background.
If nscde_use_xsettingsd
is set to 1 in the $FVWM_USERDIR/NsCDE.conf
after applying new color theme, user's X Settings in $HOME/.xsettingsd
will be adjusted
and xsettingsd(1) daemon restarted for settings in GTK and Qt applications to be applied immediately.
This option can be enabled by editing NsCDE.conf or during initial setup. NsCDE starts xsettingsd
daemon with "-c $FVWM_USERDIR/Xsettingsd.conf" parameter. This file must be present if it was not
installed by the initial setup procedure.
Key Bindings:
Ctrl+Q: Quits Color Style Manager.
P: Like was pressed. Previews currently selected color scheme from the list.
Up/Down: Goes one item on the color schemes list up or down.
Sun Help and F1: Displays this help text.
Notice: In the preview mode under FVWM3 non-global monitor layout, only the backdrop of the currently focused monitor is previewed in the colors of the new palette.