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Accepted
Nicolas Raoul
Asked: 2011-06-01 01:30:29 +0800 CST

gnome-terminal tabs are very dark, difficult to tell which tab is in use

  • 772

Here are two applications that use tabs: gedit and gnome-terminal

  • gedit: It is relatively easy to see which document is being edited
  • terminal: It is difficult to tell whether I am using the left or right terminal, because both of the tabs are very dark.

Dark tabs

Is it me having bad eyes, or the choice of colors is questionable here?
I tried all settings in the gnome-terminal application, to no avail.

I am using the "Ambiance" appearance, which is default. In "Customize theme", I tried to change the "controls" setting to "Radiance", it solves the problem but it also turns the indicators bar to silver, which does not fit with the launcher's dark background.

Gnome-terminal users, how are you dealing with this problem?

gnome-terminal

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Since things have changed a bit in 11.10 and editing gtkrc (which worked in 11.04) may not be relevant, here's what I did to improve contrast between the active and inactive tabs in gedit:
    I opened /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/gtk-widgets.css and in the section titled with ".notebook tab", I replaced

    background-image: -gtk-gradient (linear, left top, left bottom,
                                 from (shade (@bg_color, 0.97)),
                                 color-stop (0.80, shade (@bg_color, 0.95)),
                                 to (shade (@bg_color, 0.92)));

    with

    background-color: #222222

    One will obviously use a suitable color in place of #222222. It's also possible to just tweak the values after "bg_color" and retain a gradient effect for what it's worth.

    Please note that I'm using a laptop (Dell Inspiron 1545) and I don't know about how this will work on desktops or other devices.

    On my kit, it also gives nice contrast in the terminal.

    Edit: this workaround is valid for 12.04 for both gnome terminal and gedit.

    • 8

  2. There is already a bug report for this, please mark it as important to you as well: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/771641

    The workaround is described here: How to make selected tab in terminal more prominent

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