Pago Provi

Darkening Kubuntu 8.10 aka Intrepid Ibex

Every once in a while I get it in my head to try a dark theme on my desktop computers. Sometimes I seem to think they look nice, which they of course don’t, they’re just depressing. Sometimes I pretend it’s better on the eyes (that’s my current excuse), and it’s less distracting then a lot of colours. And sometimes it’s just the last theme I tried when I was bored. Every time though I have to go find how to make everything “fit” so I don’t get stuck with black letters on a black background or things like that. So this is a small list of things to do to make several of the programs I use work.

KDE:
Click the KDE “start” button, choose “System Settings” . Click “Appearance” -> Colours. Here you can choose between several colour themes, I chose “Obsidian Coast”.

Kate:
In the menu choose “Settings” -> “Configure Kate”.
On the left click “Editor Component” -> “Fonts & Colours” -> “Colour tab”.
Click on the coloured bar behind “Text area background” -> “Normal text”, here you can choose for example “plain black”. I’ve also changed the “current line” background to “#1F1F1F” (which is very dark, but it will still be visible which is the current line). You can pick more colours in the “Normal Text Styles” tab.

Firefox / browsing:
Using KDE system colours (which is default, if I remember correctly), Firefox should already be quite OK by now. But if you want, you can install for instance the Firefox Pitchdark theme. This will make scrollbars etc. more visible, though I must say I’m not so fond of how the tabs look there. “NASA Night Launch” is the one I liked more.

When browsing, most of your screen will be occupied by the colours chosen by the people that made the sites you visit. Because this is usually black on light background, you might want to change that behaviour too. Just using the Firefox preferences to default to black background will in a lot of cases give you illegible pages. To solve this, you can use the Darken Greasemonkey user script; it’s a very simple user script that will make the background black and any text except links white. By default it will work for any (*) page you view, but you could add exceptions by right-clicking the greasy monkey in Firefox (usually on the bottom right), choosing “Manage user scripts”,select “Darken” and add addresses to the “Excluded pages” box.

Thunderbird:
In my favourite e-mail client I used the PitchDark theme.
To install it click “Tools” -> “Add-Ons” -> “Themes”, install the downloaded theme and click “Use Theme” to apply. This theme has the added advantage that it also supports the Lightning plug-in.

I’m not sure anymore this was really necessary anymore (I did this before installing the Pitchdark theme), but I also did:
“Edit” -> “Preferences” -> “Formatting” -> “Colours” -> (white text on black background)

Amarok:
Click “Settings” -> “Configure Amarok”.
Choose “Appearance” -> “Colour scheme” -> “Custom color scheme”, choose black background.
Context browser style: “example”.

Okular:
Click “Settings” -> “Configure Okular”.
“Accessibility” -> “Change Colours” -> “Colour mode” “Invert Colours”.
While you’re at it: there’s also the option to not “Obey DRM limitations” in the “General” menu here!

oOo:
For OpenOffice.org I don’t have a good solution yet, but I for one don’t use it all that often. Anyone who does know how to do this: feel free to add it to the comments!

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