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Chris H
Asked: 2013-12-06 01:51:30 +0800 CST

monochrome on a colour monitor under XFCE - easy switching?

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Is there a way to switch, on the fly, between colour and monochrome graphics. Even nicer would be to have a preview for how the screen would look to a colour blind user as well. That however is a side-issue, I'm interested in quickly checking how figures I'm working on will look printed B+W.

I've seen this compiz-based solution, but as I understand it, that's for unity only, not xfce, so is there a method.

(technically, the primary machine I'm interested in doing this on is Ubuntu 12.04LTS+XFCE, and not Xubuntu)

12.04

1 Answers

  1. Please specify what you mean by monochrome...

    Monochrome monitor

    You can employ xrandr scripts clickable on a panel. I'm using for example following script xrandr --output VGA-0 --auto --right-of LVDS-0 to enable VGA output on the right from my notebook. Please specify what you mean by monochrome... by xrandr you can simply switch graphics mode of any graphics output, so it could be on one clik in the menu panel. Read xrandr --help on how to switch it to different monitors/modes

    Colors off

    You can use xrandr to tune colors... can suit your needs. watch for brightness and gamma settings

    Update: you can use xrandr to change saturation as well by the set attribute, example: xrandr --output TV --set Saturation 0-100. But the device and the driver should support it... otherwise you will get BadName error. I can imagine, that you will change it trough the color profile of your display. Solution very much depends on what you have.

    Monochrome icon/colour theme

    You can switch monochrome theme on the fly in System settings - windows manager by choosing a monochrome theme. you can run settings from command line by xfwm4-settings see the man page for details: http://swoolley.org/man.cgi/1/xfwm how to switch it from the command line. Again you can make it part of panel, so it could be made on one click.

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