colorsets..I'm stuck

Configuration General Questions
1

hey all,

I have been working on a config from scratch and I am a bit stuck on colorsets. For whatever reason I’m just not getting it…how the work/syntax and the way to incorporate them. What do they define? Window borders? pagers/buttons? or everything? Any direction would be greatly apprecaited~

Thanks

2

Colorsets allow you to define very specific colours for some aspects of a window. They’re generic enough such that they’re also applied to menus as well. To take an example:

Colorset 3 fg tan, bg navy

This colorset is defined by the number “3” – that’s the first argument a colorset will expect. Any options after that are defining how the colorset will look when it is applied to windows.

In the above instance, the foreground colour is “tan”, and the background colour is navy – not that appealing. But what that means is that so that the two colours do not clash, the hilight colours are calculated for you. If you look at any window, around the edge, where a relief is drawn, you’ll see another colour complimenting it – that’s the hilight colour. You can also tell it explicitly what colour to use instead of the calculated one:

Colorset 3 fg tan, bg navy, sh blue, hi black

“sh” is shadow, and “hi” is hilight. It will look quite odd. But we haven’t stopped there. We have yet to tell FVWM which colorset is to be applied to which windows, i.e. whether it is to be used for focused, or non-focused windows:

Style * HiLightColorset 3

Applies the colorset “3” to focused windows. If you define another colorset, you can do so for unfocused windows:

Style * Colorset <n>

Colorsets are also powerful for other things – in the use of transparency, and for allowing pixmaps to be applied, too. You can also have gradients of colours applied in your colorset, to blend different colours together, and at different angles. If you look at “man FvwmTheme” – that has all the examples you could need. Play about with them, and experiment. :slight_smile:

– Thomas Adam

3

Hiya~

Thanks for the reply Thomas. I am still confused about the 4 separate colors that you define in the colorset. I am looking for something simple, similar to guili’s config here:

clan-hash.com/~guli/fvwm/Scr … 050123.jpg

I plan on setting and tweaking the colors (don’t think I’m avoiding that)…I am just confused as to what the fg/bg and hi/sh colors are. Is this a set of colors you assign to a window as a whole, or to a part of the window? (i.e. the left/right border). Gah!

thanks for your patience with me :O)

4

OK, if you detail (with an example colorset (or colorsets :slight_smile:) what it is you want to know, with specifics, I’d be glad to take a look for you (or someone else, of course.)

They’re applied to the window as a whole. As has been metioned countless times, I have a patch in the making that will allow colorsets to be applied to specific parts of a window… I have yet to release it.

– Thomas Adam

5

I’ve been using openbox now for awhile, and while I like the way it looks (for the most part)…there are a lot of things that I would like to change in the way it runs. Not to mention the things I would like to add to it. Fvwm will let me do that (isn’t that why most of us are here…hehe)

Here is a screenshot of my current desktop:

jasonbeaudoin.net/openbox-screenshot.png

I like how my current window borders/title bar config. So I’m looking to recreate this look. I am a bit confused in how to set the colors here, the borders (left/right are single pixel black, different from the top/bottom), as well as how to set the specific look of the title bar buttons.

I’ve been reading up on how to set the actions of the buttons in the title bar, but how is the actual look of the button set?

Thanks guys~

6

Well, in that case, rather than (possibly) reinventing the wheel, I would look at the configuration for fluxbox in fvwm-themes and borrow that to suit your needs.

– Thomas Adam