In Gnome, you can set the top and bottom tool bars to be transparent, which is great if you wallpaper is a light color. The ‘Applications’ ‘Places’ ‘System’ buttons along with the date and time are all in the standard black font. I, however, like using a dark background as my desktop wallpaper. I didn’t like having white tool bars just so that I could read the text. Here’s how to change the text into whatever color you would like:
First, open the terminal and type:
gedit .gtkrc-2.0
Insert the following into the file that was opened:
style “panel”
{
fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”
# fg[PRELIGHT] = “#000000″
# fg[ACTIVE] = “#ffffff”
# fg[SELECTED] = “#000000″
# fg[INSENSITIVE] = “#8A857C”
# bg[NORMAL] = “#000000″
# bg[PRELIGHT] = “#dfdfdf”
# bg[ACTIVE] = “#D0D0D0″
# bg[SELECTED] = “#D8BB75″
# bg[INSENSITIVE] = “#EFEFEF”
# base[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”
# base[PRELIGHT] = “#EFEFEF”
# base[ACTIVE] = “#D0D0D0″
# base[SELECTED] = “#DAB566″
# base[INSENSITIVE] = “#E8E8E8″
# text[NORMAL] = “#161616″
# text[PRELIGHT] = “#000000″
# text[ACTIVE] = “#000000″
# text[SELECTED] = “#ffffff”
# text[INSENSITIVE] = “#8A857C”
}
widget “*PanelWidget*” style “panel”
widget “*PanelApplet*” style “panel”
class “*Panel*” style “panel”
widget_class “*Mail*” style “panel”
class “*notif*” style “panel”
class “*Notif*” style “panel”
class “*Tray*” style “panel”
class “*tray*” style “panel”
The top line that says:
fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”
changes the text color to ‘white’ or ffffff.
This is what it looks like:
If you want to change your text color to a specific color, you will need to get that color code and insert it here. Colourlovers.com has an excellent list of the HTML color hex codes.
Now click save and you should be finished. All you need to do now is type this command into the terminal to reload your gnome task bars:
killall gnome-panel
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Written by Michael
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August 15th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Does not work for me I’m afraid. When I try to open the file again after making the changes I get:
“/home/flor/.gtkrc-2.0:1: error: unexpected character `\342′, expected string constant” (it does open eventually after throwing that at me) Any idea what could be the problem?
August 15th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
I have found that some people could not get this to work. While it did work on my laptop I ended up using a program called Gnome Color Chooser (you should be able to find it using the synaptic package manager) on my desktop. I had planned on writing an article about the program but basically it allows you to change the color of the task bar text (along with other many other things).
August 16th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Thank you for your response. I’m probably being spectacularly blind, but where in the application is the option for changing the task bar text? I’ve been looking for 15 minutes…
August 16th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Disregard my previous comment, I had to clear out the gtkrc-2.0 file. Cheers!