The things I do for you people…

Todd, Timo, Megan, Rob… guess which Jankcast episode I started listening to?

Commedia dell’Arte (clicky clicky!)

(for a bit of context)

Using Adwaita Dark for your linux desktop: fixing the desktop icon color.

I was getting a bit tired of the old grey gradients of the default Gnome3 theme in Fedora 16 (Adwaita) so I poked around and found that there is a hacked Adwaita Dark theme that uses the color scheme you see in a couple of multimedia apps in regular Adwaita for all the desktop (basically, turns everything dark).

You can download it from this website.

It looks pretty spiffy, but it has a small drawback: if you’re using Nautilus icons on the desktop (which is not the default in Gnome3) the icon names have a very dark text. This was probably overlooked because the original author wasn’t using them.

Here is the easy fix: go to your Adwaita Dark theme’s gtk-3.0 folder (probably ~/.themes/Adwaita Dark/ ) and edit gnome-applications.css with your favorite text editor and change the .nautilus-desktop.nautilus-canvas-item selector like this:

.nautilus-desktop.nautilus-canvas-item {
 /* Was Originally:
 * color: @theme_bg_color;
 */ 
/* Fixed version: */
color: @theme_text_color;
/* End of the fix */
text-shadow:1 1 black;
}

Yes, it’s really that easy: one line of CSS!

The theme should update in realtime. If it doesn’t try changing it and back, or logging out. Enjoy!