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Old Geezer
Asked: 2018-06-07 18:52:58 +0800 CST

Ubuntu 18.04: Change color of window title bar

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Is it possible to make the color of the title bar of the active window different from the rest?

Right now it's black for all windows in my default set-up. I am unable to determine if I can start typing as I don't know which the focused window is.

gnome themes 18.04 gnome-color-manager

3 Answers

  1. This works for me (Ubuntu 18.04 + Gnome 3.28.1):

    nano ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

    To customize the active title bar background colors use .titlebar and .backdrop (for inactive windows). 

    .titlebar {
    background: #3089FF;
    color:white; 
}

.titlebar:backdrop  {
    background: #777777;
    color:white;
}

    After saving the file, remember refresh gnome using this command:

    setsid gnome-shell --replace
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  2. A very simple way to make the color of the title bar different, is to choose a different theme, that does take this aspect into account (why the default one doesn't, beats me).

    To change the default theme, install Gnome Tweaks (sudo apt install gnome-tweaks), then choose a theme like Adwaita:

    Gnome Tweaks change theme

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  3. Not really a different answer but I found these colours more aesthetically pleasing under the ambience theme. I used gPick to make them match the rest of the theme (except the colours). Unfortunately you can't just leave them blank and have system defaults - that first one just applies in all cases without the second one.

    This didn't work for all windows (notably chrome + some config windows) until after restarting, not sure why. Just reloading gnome shell wasn't enough.

    .titlebar {
    background: #1856dd;
    color:white; 
}

.titlebar:backdrop  {
    background: #3E3D3A;
    color:#807D78;
}

    Interestingly if you leave out the 'color' bits of those, gnome shell restarts much more quickly (even if you replace white with #FFFFFF). I don't see any errors in syslog or anything obvious in journalctl so not sure why.

    Without setting white it looks a bit nasty, so I added it back in!

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