How to set the colour of the task bar?

[Mariane]

Hi,

Please, how can I set the colour of the task bar without having to fiddle with themes or I don't know what...
I would simply like to be able to set this colour like I set the colour of window frames, windows title bars, etc.

I would also like to be able to set the font of the text in the task bar, and its colour. System notifications text appears black on a dark grey background, popping-up information such as "download is finished" is unreadable.

Another (related) question: after a dist-upgrade, the titles of grouped opened files in the task bar have become blurred. For example, if I have several kwrite files opened and I click on the "opened kwrite files" button, I cannot read the names of the files, they are so blurred I have to guess.

I guess all this comes from themes. I once tried several... I really don't care if my diplay looks ancient, I just want it to have the colours I like and readable texts everywhere.

[Rog132]

Short: The task bar is plasma object. The plasma objects are using the plasma themes. Colour, transparency, etc...

You could search the least disturbing theme and edit it. The plasma themes are made of the svg images and optional color scheme file. The svg images can be edited with an image editor.



More:

AskUbuntu - How to change color/transparency of all desktop panels?: http://askubuntu.com/questions/70694...desktop-panels

AskUbuntu - Change font color of inactive apps on KDE taskbar: http://askubuntu.com/questions/27926...on-kde-taskbar

AskUbuntu - KDE taskbar questions: http://askubuntu.com/questions/26239...kbar-questions

AskUbuntu - Remove panel shadow in KDE 4.8+: http://askubuntu.com/questions/19400...dow-in-kde-4-8

[Mariane]

Thank you
I found mine, "Blue_Sora":
/home/kub/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/Blue_Sora/

But then, there are 3 files:
/home/kub/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/Blue_Sora/opaque/widgets/panel-background.svg
/home/kub/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/Blue_Sora/translucent/widgets/panel-background.svg
/home/kub/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/Blue_Sora/widgets/panel-background.svg

They all look the same, and I don't have the long rectangles like you showed me. Instead, I have squares and patterns:



I saw nothing which would be very dark grey, like my panel... And there are some green squares which don't appear anywhere on my desktop.

In all 3 files, I changed the 4 rectangles in the middle. I set them to white via the "fill" button.
I could not change the background colour of the picture.
Now my panel is medium grey.

[Rog132]

...I found mine, "Blue_Sora"...and I don't have the long rectangles like you showed me...

I edited the default (Air) theme tasks.svgz. Also the Blue Sora has the tasks.svgz.

By the https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Pl...Theme_Elements

/tasks.svg: task item backgrounds for tasks (KDE 4.1 and later). See the section on backgrounds above for information on the required elements in this file. The following element prefixes are required:

- focus: background of focused task item

- hover: background when the pointer hovers the task item. From KDE 4.2 focus and hover can have ticker borders that will be painted
outside the task button, useful to make a glow effect.

- attention: background when tasks item is trying to get attention

- normal: background of normal, unfocused task item

- minimized: background for minimized tasks

The svg should contain elements of all five prefixes, if a prefix is missing that element will be not be drawn.

[Mariane]

Thank you.

I found tasks.svgz for Blue Sora and it has the 3 rectangles. They are light green, so it does not correspond to the colour of my tastbar (grey).

The background of this picture was grey, so I thought this might be the cause of the problem and I changed the colour of the background of tasks.svgz to yellowish. It had no effect (I reset it by changing "System settings/Desktop theme/Details/Panel background" and "System settings/Desktop theme/Details/Widget background".

[Mariane]

The least disturbing I found was air for notebook. My panel is now light grey (lighter than before) and when several files are opened with the same program (eg. kwrite), the list which opens when I click on the "opened files of such program" icon is readable and not blurred like it was before - so blurred the file names were barely guessable.

air for notebook has a directory: .kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/air-netbook, but there is nothing in it. Only an empty directory called "wallpapers". Hum...

Well, I guess I made some progress: now I know where the panel colour does not come from...

Further suggestions very very welcome

[Rog132]

air for notebook has a directory: .kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/air-netbook, but there is nothing in it. Only an empty directory called "wallpapers". Hum...

The KDE has two paths to the desktopthemes:

For all users: /usr/share/kde4/apps/desktoptheme/
For a specific user : ~/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/




When the desktoptheme is installed through the package management the theme is installed to the /usr/share/kde4/apps/desktoptheme/ .
When a user is using the ' Get New Themes' the theme is downloaded to the ~/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/ .

[kubicle]

tasks.svg(z) only affects the task (program) items on the taskbar widget, not the whole panel. Panel appearance is gotten from panel-background.svg(z)

There may also several of these files in a theme, which one is used depends, for example, if desktop effects are disabled (no transparency) the ./opaque/widgets/panel-background.svg(z) is used if it exists.