How to change the color of the scroll bar?

Question

The scrollbars in Unity are of very low contrast, and I can't notice where the scroll bar bug is just with peripheral vision. I have to look at the scrollbar. With a very 22" monitor, 1920*1080, the bar is quite small, and it's hard to notice where the bug is.

Look at Mac OS X interface and notice the blue, contrast scroll bar bug. You don't need to look at it directly to have the idea where you are in the page.

Every person's peripheral vision is of low-res. I don't have a screenshot, but you can imagine what you see by doing a simple trick:

take a screenshot and blur it by 15px in GIMP. This is how you see everything with peripheral vision. The scrollbar bug becomes completely invisible.

How can I change it so that it is contrast and I see where I am every time?

Answer 1

Found the solution: sudo and open /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc and find this code:

style "scrollbar" = "button" {

Below in the curly braces, change the bg[SOMETHING] lines to look like:

    bg[NORMAL] = @selected_bg_color
    bg[PRELIGHT] = shade (1.04, @selected_bg_color)

    bg[ACTIVE] = shade (0.96, @selected_bg_color)

Or look at the colors declared in line 1 of the file and select the one you prefer. To update the looks, in System settings/Appearance, change the theme to another one and back to Ambiance.

edit: Appears that Xterm uses Radiance theme. Scrollbars in Radiance are black on black and are just invisible. So stylish, yeah! Need to do edit that theme too.

Answer 2

I built upon what culebrón described and accidentally created something I think is pretty awesome...

Open /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc as root for modification:

gksu gedit /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

Then modify the matching section in that file to the following (remember to back up the defaults in case you don't like the changes):

style "scrollbar" = "button" {
    xthickness = 2
    ythickness = 2

    bg[NORMAL] = shade (0.62, @bg_color)
    bg[PRELIGHT] = shade (0.66, @bg_color)

    bg[ACTIVE] = shade (0.64, @bg_color)

    engine "murrine"
    {
        border_shades = {0.95, 0.90}
        roundness = 3
        contrast = 1.0
        trough_shades = {0.92, 0.98}
        lightborder_shade = 1.3
        glowstyle = 5
        glow_shade = 1.02
        gradient_shades = {1.2, 1.0, 1.0, 0.86}
        trough_border_shades = {0.9, 0.98}
    }
}

Save, then apply the changes by toggling themes or logging out.

The new, awesome, and usable scrollbars will look like:

Hopefully someone finds this helpful, thanks!

Answer 3

Although not a direct answer to the question, if you dislike the new scrollbars (I don't blame you, they are quite horrendous in my personal opinion), you can revert to standard scrollbars by running the following command:

sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar liboverlay-scrollbar3-0.2-0 liboverlay-scrollbar-0.2-0

Answer 4

Another alternative:

Some themes that come with colored scrollbars, (Adwaita, NewLooks, etc), have scrollbars that can be easily changed be altering the selected_bg_color setting using dconf-editor: How do I change the "Selected Items" color?