Features of GNOME Color Chooser

  • change colors (e.g. background, window decoration, tooltips)
  • change sizes of widgets (e.g. of buttons, scrollbars or the main padding)
  • allow use of bright or dark wallpapers without getting icons or panel text unreadable
  • adjust the size of start and panel menues or large toolbars
  • colorize desktop icons and activate hover effects (requires GNOME 2.18+)
  • configure your gtk engines and let your current theme be drawn by an installed gtk engine of your choice (requires GNOME 2.18+ or engines that support the newly introduced engine schema definitions respectively)
  • *new* disable menubar and toolbar shadows (remove the horizontal line beneath those bars and make them flat)
  • many more, of course, heh ;-)

How it works:

GNOME Color Chooser creates a so called gtkrc file with theming instructions to GTK+. Instead of writing all settings directly to ~/.gtkrc-2.0 it creates the file ~/.gtkrc-2.0-gnome-color-chooser and let the former file include the latter so that a) all settings are kept clean and simple and not mixed with manual changes and b) a user doesn't lose his own gtkrc modifications.

Additionally to plain theming options it supports Engine Schemas (that are introduced by this project and now officially supported by GNOME and its official GTK+ engines). Those schemas empowers GNOME Color Chooser (and other applications, of course) to list all available engine options (and its valid values) of every supported GTK+ engine. You can even use multiple engines inside a single GTK+ theme or the same engine multiple times with different engine options.

Everything you can do with GNOME Color Chooser can be done by manual gtkrc scripting, either. This application is just a front-end to ease modifications to themes and demonstrate new theming options that are added to GNOME within the scope of this project. So feel free to explain in the forum, which theming abilities GNOME currently lacks. Maybe it's possible to add those options to one of the next GNOME versions and thus the GNOME Color Chooser.