Can I change gedit's background color without changing to another theme?

Question

I like ambiance but i find it a little too hard on the eyes to have to edit files on a pure white background, like gedit's.

Is there any way to modify my theme to make gedit's background color darker?

Answer 1

As wojox said, you can change Gedit's theme.

The gtksourceview page (old page from Wayback Machine) (new page from Wiki Gnome) on the Gnome website has more information about gedit themes. (Gtksourceview is the name of the software component that displays text in gedit.)

Modifying Existing Themes

To modify the built-in themes, copy them from /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/styles/ to ~/.local/share/gtksourceview-2.0/styles/ and edit the text files.

Finding New Themes

You can find several themes in this git repository. It looks like you can install them with:

sudo apt-get install git-core
git clone https://github.com/mig/gedit-themes.git ~/.gnome2/gedit/styles

_{(This will allow you to run cd ~/.gnome2/gedit/styles ; git pull to get updates to these themes.)}

Building Your Own

You can also try this online theme generator. I found that on this article about creating gtksourceview themes.

Answer 2

Here are a few steps to change the GEdit background color.

1. Click on Text editor in the right-top corner.

   

2. Click on Preferences.
3. Select Fonts & Colors.
4. Make the right choice (Cobalt is my favorite).

Note: You can use Customized Color Schemes also.

Answer 3

Open gedit and go to Edit > Preferences > Font&Color. You can change it there. You may need gedit-plugins installed.

Answer 4

Unfortunately, Gedit doesn't let you change its current colors and save them as a new theme. I don't know why, as it seems pretty basic... Maybe the developers wanted to keep it as small and simple as possible.

Using the online theme generator is quite easy, though:

1. Go to the Scribes Theme Generator and pick the colors you want. The on-screen example shows how your choices look.

2. Click the "Generate" button to save your theme as an .xml file.

3. In Gedit's Edit menu, click Preferences; then on the Font & Colors tab, click the Add button. A file window appears. Select your .xml file and click "Add Scheme". Your new colors are immediately applied.

Answer 5

Open the document classic.xml:

gksudo gedit /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/styles/classic.xml

Then You put the following just.

<!-- Global Settings -->
<style name="text" foreground="#black" background="#white"/>
<style name="selection" foreground="#white" background="#black"/>
<style name="cursor" foreground="#black"/>
<style name="current-line" background="#grey"/>
<style name="line-numbers" foreground="#grey" background="#white"/>
<style name="draw-spaces" foreground="#grey"/>