I'm trying to adjust the Aya plasma theme to make it suit my needs. I would love to have a more lighter desktop with some black accents, instead of having the blackness of Oxygen - which is elegant, but a bit sombre.

Apart from some other changes I would like to have black coloured fonts in the panels and white on my "desktop area" (not sure what to call it). So what I would like is to set the font colour for widgets in panels and the desktop area differently.

Does anybody know if it's currently possible in KDE 4.1? I couldn't find anything in the documentation. Or is it being implemented in the 4.2 release? I would love to have more fine grained control over such elements.

1 Plus for this request!

I was just about to post the exact same thing! I personally like lighter plasma themes like Aya, but white fonts just don't come through nicely. The digital clock plasmoid has full font control; surely it couldn't be too hard to have that for all plasmoids? Ideally, a global plasma settings manager would be really nice. You could set all fonts for the entire plasma workspace. And color schemes. You could even support style sheets. You could ask for the world on a string. You wouldn't get it, but you could ask. But I digress...

Anyways, I really think that simple plasmoid font control is rather important as far as plasma's usability goes. Right now any plasmoid that gives much useful information (that is, uses TEXT) is only practical if you use very dark plasma themes (Oxygen, Elegance, etc). That's nice for a while, but it gives you a rather limited palette. Besides, isn't FOSS all about choice?

Just my 0.002$

A settings manager would be nice indeed. But on the other hand I don't mind hard coding the colours in a theme file. Font colour settings for each separate widget would be a solution, but I think it's too much to ask from all the widget developers. Storing such information in a theme file and having the possibility for widgets to override those settings seems an easier way.

But I can't imagine that this request hasn't been asked before, maybe on a bug tracker or something. Does anybody know if it's possible in the 4.2 trunk version of KDE?

Not being able to use dark backgrounds and themes like Aya (which does look nice with the default wallpaper) is a shame, in my opinion. Using Aya with my current desktop wallpaper makes the Folder view widget look like this when placed on the desktop area:



Of course I could change my wallpaper to something different and lighter, but themes should be able to cope with darker varieties.

How hard is it to edit a Plasma theme? Of course, it would not make a good first impression to new KDE users to find that they have to mess with code to change something so trivial as a font. OS X and even Vista keep the basics like these pretty simple for the end user.

Maybe better to post this in plasma because the plasma dev. are reading that part. I would also want a bit more control of plasma widgets

neverendingo was so kind to move the thread to the Plasma subforum.

I was wondering, however, if this might do what I want.

I found this thread becasue right now, I'm searching for a way to adjust the text color for widgets. I've found a theme that I really really want to use (spoons) and the only problem is that when you open the Twitter widget in spoons, the white text just disappears against the white theme. It's not even a matter of wallpaper. KDE Twitter in Spoons equals no text.

This has happened to me several times, though it's usually about wallpaper. This wallpaper obscures the text in folderview, so I try another theme that makes KDE twitter unreadable, so I try a new wallpaper that makes me want to move everything around. It's like a brand new form of dependancy hell. Custom text color simply needs to be adjustable for all widgets as a matter of standard equipment. There are just too many ways issues of legibility can mess you up.

Does anybody know if this is possible now in KDE 4.2, if necessary by using a hack/workaround? Or should I file a feature request for this?

I was working on a theme which implements a light colour for panels and a darker shade for widgets. Unfortunately controlling font colour for seperate pieces on the desktop is stil a problem. So it's currently not possible to realise these mockups:



It would be rather nice to be able to specify them for each visual element. So a colour entry ([Color:Panel] for example) for the panel and one ([Color:Workspace] or [Color:Desktop]) for where the main space for widgets and what not is.

Please do file a feature request for this if it has not already been filed.

I think it's covered by this feature request.