SOLVED: Xfce: hard-coded black title bar

[pccobbler]

I always like to have a blue title bar. antiX offers it (the theme is called clear or clean something). MATE has it in mate-themes with TraditionalOk. Q4OS offers it in Trinity (TDE) with its Spring theme. Linix Mint used to offer it in Cinnamon via Metacity themes, but support for it was deleted in 19, though smurphos added it back as a custom. Heck, it's easy to do in Sparky's Openbox (MinimalGUI), so I would think it's possible in Xfce.

I just installed a Sparky Xfce system. It seems no matter what I do, the title bar remains black, like it's hard-coded. There does not appear to be a Qt settings dialog to play with. Does some theme exist which wil render title bars blue?

[bin]

You're thinking of Clearlooks and others like it. Yes I prefer a blue bar as well.

I use the blue version of this https://store.kde.org/p/1208465/ - though i altered the blue to match the light blue of Clearlooks. It depends if you like the old Redhat Bluecurve or not.

There's load of XFCE themes around - the bit you're looking for is the xfwm theme.

[pccobbler]

Thanks for the reply.

Okay, I downloaded two of them (xfwm and metacity, both blue), extracted them, and copied them into /usr/share/themes, which I thought would have sufficient for them to appear in the list of themes in the Appearance dialog. But no. Is there something else that needs to be done?

[paxmark1]

Just a shot in the dark, I could be very wrong.  Might be xfwm4 theme.  I am using lxqt but with the xfwm4 instead of openbox. 

https://wiki.xfce.org/howto/xfwm4_theme

[bin]

Thanks for the reply.

Okay, I downloaded two of them (xfwm and metacity, both blue), extracted them, and copied them into /usr/share/themes, which I thought would have sufficient for them to appear in the list of themes in the Appearance dialog. But no. Is there something else that needs to be done?

You should be looking in Settings>Window Manager

[pccobbler]

@bin

I saw that dialog. I saw no relevant settings. Also, that dialog is really annoying, as it has sliders that can be modified by mistake, yet there is no Cancel botton at the bottom.

[bin]

Not getting a lot of info here.

OK - please provide the location and name of a theme that you downloaded so I can cross check to see if I get the same result.

The Window Manager tool makes more sense when viewed from Settings>Settings Manager. it then becomes part of a larger whole and you get a Back button at the bottom. Picking a theme only works when you click the OK button.

Many old themes do not behave well if they are GTK2 only. Which XFCE version of Sparky did you install - the testing version is GTK3 centric and brings a few more challenges for older themes.

[pccobbler]

What I did before was: downloaded and extracted "Bluecurve Revival blue" and "Bluecurve Revival XFCE blue", and copied them to /usr/share/themes. The former contains a folder named "metacity-1" and a file named "README (colors)" and the latter contains a folder named "xfwm4" and a file named "colors.txt." I modified the permissions of the two folders to the same as the other ones, i.e., 755, and I replaced the spaces in the filenames with '-' because I suspected they might cause problems.

However, "Bluecurve-Revival-blue" did not appear in the list of WindowsManager, while "Bluecurve-Revival-XFCE blue" did. Just for laughs, I also copied "Cinnamox-Colours" (I think it's from mate-themes) from /home/me/.themes, but it also did not appear in the list.

I see what you mean by starting WindowsManager from Settings->SettingsManager, as it has significantly more content. I was able to select "Bluecurve Revival XFCE blue" and the title bars immediately changed to blue. I tried my usual setting of TraditionalOk from mate-themes and it also immediately modified the color of the title bar. This is one of the things that drives me crazy about Linux desktops, as there's often multiple ways to access a setting, but the functionality is often rather different., with LXDE/LXQt being a good example.

I will change the title of this request to SOLVED.

Thanks for both bin and paxmark1 for their assistance. By the way, I rather like the darker blue of "Bluecurve Revival XFCE blue."