ambiance and radiance colours themes on 12.10 / 13.04

Question

Does anybody know if these themes are compatible with the latest version of gtk yet?

I like the ambiance theme but would like the orange highlights to be blue or what ever I fancy at the time.

Please also feel free suggest any alternatives.

Answer 1

Well you can edit the CSS files of GTK to change the selection color:

1. Make a text file called something like colour.sh and paste the blow lines into the file.

   oldcolor=f07746
   newcolor=f0cb46
   old_progress_bar_color=db6a3c
   new_progress_bar_color=dbb93b
   sed -i "s|$oldcolor|$newcolor|g" /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
   sed -i "s|$oldcolor|$newcolor|g" /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/gtk-main.css
   sed -i "s|$oldcolor|$newcolor|g" /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
   sed -i "s|$old_progress_bar_color|$new_progress_bar_color|g" /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/gtk-widgets.css
   

2. Make this script executable, enter in a terminal chmod +x colour.sh
3. Now type sudo ./colour.sh in the terminal to run the script and put your password when prompted.
4. Logout and login back, and the selection color is changed to light yellow (from the default orange).

Above script changes the selection and progress bar colors to yellow, as seen in the image below.

This works everywhere except nautilus filecopy progressbar. Ambiance uses a png image file to paint progress bar of filecopy dialog (the file is this: /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/assets/progressbar-vertical-fill.png and /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/assets/progressbar-horizontal-fill.png). Now you need to do some image magic via gimp to convert these images' color from orange to yellow via color transformation (this is "Colorize" in gimp). A detailed tutorial for the same can be found here.

Window border buttons, check boxes, radio buttons and everything else is all rendered from png files, which are located in /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/assets, /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/assets and /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/metacity-1. These images need to be converted from orange to yellow. There should be a way to automate this color conversions via scripting. The superuser link on how to change colors in image should help with all this.

NOTE: You can find a full list of hex codes (f07746 is orange and f0cb46 is yellow) here.

You can also find the analogous colors to a given color at this link. Just replace the color hex code in the link with your color, and you can get matching shades and hues of other colors.