Change visual apearance of Qubes Manager using Xresources

User Support
#1

I have switched to the urxvt terminal and used .Xresources to give it a more pleasant look. As a side effect, this also changed some of the colors of Qubes Manager.

On one side, this is nice and on the other side, not so much. The issue is, only some colors were changed while others remained their default. This makes Qubes Manager more or less unusable as there is now light text on light background, or the other way around.

Where can I find a list of all color settings available to Qubes Manager? Alternativeley, hints on how I can restore Qubes Manager to its default colors would als be helpful.

I have searched this forum and the Qubes OS Github organization and I was unable to find something useful. I understand that Qubes Manager is written in Python and uses QT as its GUI framework. I suspect that reading the colors from Xresources is a feature of QT. I lack the knowledge (keywords for search) to investigate further in that direction.

#2

Maybe you could share the .Xresources that had such a side effect ?

#3

Have a look at the Xresources of the Solarized project: solarized/solarized at master · altercation/solarized · GitHub.

The only things I added, are URxvt specific. Those lines start with URxvt*

#4

OK so this is a generic theming .Xresources. It’s probably not a Qubes-specific issue, does it have the same effect on other Qt apps (or Gtk apps) ?

If you wish to change only the look of rxvt OTOH, you should probably avoid the “all apps” idiom.

Another thing is, I was under the impression that Qt/Gtk had a more modern approach to theming than old .Xresources, but obviously it’s still influencing them :slight_smile:

#5

That is also my impression but I do not yet now where else to go for asking questions.

None that I am aware of. But then, I do not not use that may applications. The only one I do know if is Qutebrowser and this one is not affected. You can give qutebrowser support for Xresources but you have to explicitly configure this.

It most certainly has, as has Gnome, XFCE, KDE and all the others but to my knowledge, each having their own way to do things giving users a hard time to have a consistent look and feel. I kind of like the promise of Xresources of being universal. But yea, it might no longer be up to the task for modern desktops.