GTK3 and GTK2 themes checkbox

Question

I have a good theme. But there is one disadvantage. I don't see if checkbox is checked or unchecked until I place mouse cursor above it. Can you tell me what I should change in the theme to be able see checkbox state?

Some example: In thunderbird this problem is present: the tick marks not visible (because the background color is white and the tick color is white too). But in nautilus I can see the checkbox states, it is not a common tick mark, the ckeckbox changes its color. From the vasa1 comment could be inferred that I have this problem with GTK2 theme.

Theme name:Shiki-Nouveau-Dust

Answer 1

I find that main reason for corrupted theme behavior, was missing package gtk-engines-murrine in my (gentoo) distribution. Installing that package help to solve this problem. In this case no theme tweaking was needed. To check missing packages related to gtk, try to run gtk based application from shell and observe the standard output.

In case if this is not the case, one can try to check the certain colors used in gtk widgets eg. #000000 or #ffffff and search for the color occurence in theme files, which are usualy in folder ~/.themes I use 'gcolor-2' tool for pick color of actual running widgets. In case of theme 'AmbiancePNight' I found following in file 'gtkrc' :

style "radiocheck"  = "button" {
    text[NORMAL] =  lighter(@selected_bg_color)
    text[PRELIGHT] = shade(1.06, shade (0.535, @selected_bg_color))
    bg[NORMAL]   = shade (0.92, @bg_color)
    bg[PRELIGHT] = mix (0.2, @selected_bg_color, shade(1.1, @bg_color))
    fg[INSENSITIVE] = darker (@bg_color)
    fg[ACTIVE] = @fg_color

    engine "murrine" {
        reliefstyle = 3
        gradient_shades = {1.2, 1.0, 1.0, 0.9}
        shadow_shades = {0.6, 0.5}
        textstyle = 0
    }
}

Start your favorite editor and, try to play with the first line for example like this: text[NORMAL] = "#fff"

After that open theme chooser dialog and de-select/select the theme to load new settings. NOTE: that if you use wrong syntax the theme will not be loaded, and different theme will be used instead!!!