changing the active window title bar color

[houghi]

On Mon, Dec 09, 2013 at 10:03:39AM -0800, Josh Stratton wrote:
> I'm coming from unity and I really like xfce, but so far I'm really struggling
> not having the active window getting a distinct background color like in unity,
> gnome, or kde.  I looked through various included themes and they all seemed to
> have the basic grey titlebar that didn't differentiate between focused and
> unfocused window.  
> 
> I also tried modifying the theme directly, but didn't see any attribute
> differentiating a focused or unfocused window.  
> 
> Is there an easy way to do this?  

I looked and also can not find it. I found e.g.
/usr/share/themes/Quinx/xfwm4/themerc that said:
full_width_title=true
button_offset=0
button_spacing=2
button_layout=O|SHMC
title_vertical_offset_active=2
title_vertical_offset_inactive=2
active_text_color=#000065
inactive_text_color=#000065

So I can change the color of the text, but not of the background. I then
looked further and in the directory /usr/share/themes/Quinx/xfwm4/ and
there were a bunch of *-X-active.xpm and *-X-inactive.xpm files.
Looking at them with an image viewer, it showed me that those were the
ones you need to change.

So what you see is not a color, but rather an image (with color)

So if you want to be able to just see the difference between active and
inactive, perhaps changing the font color in themerc (as root) is enough
for you. Otherwise you need to change all or some of the images. Best make
a whole new theme for yourself by copying the all the files, rename the
theme and the select that theme.

The advantage is that it is much more flexible for designers. You can
really change everything. The disadvantage is that it is not just a color
change.

houghi
-- 
This is written under the inluence of the following:
>   Artist : Evanescence
>     Song : The End
>    Album : EP