Scheme Files

Documentation / Contents - Color Schemes

• Overview of Colour Schemes
  • Where the Controls Are
  • Fonts Are Separate
  • What Ships
• Choosing a Scheme
  • The Standalone Color Scheme Window
  • What the List Shows
  • The Lock, and Why Names Match
  • If Nothing Changes
• The Roles
  • Ground and Chrome
  • Selection
  • Text and Wells
  • Controls
  • Window Manager
  • Content Accents
  • Metrics
  • The Nine Font Roles
  • What Happens to a Role You Leave Out
• Scheme Files
  • The File
  • Colour Values
  • Where Schemes Are Found
  • Two Names
  • What Ships
  • Writing Your Own
• The Scheme Daemon
  • What It Does
  • Two Kinds of Application
  • The Order of the Resource Block
  • Asking It What It Is Doing
  • Making It Change
  • Signals
  • If Something Wipes the Colours
• Command Line
  • The Daemon
  • The Panel
  • Environment Variables
  • The Background Configuration
• Schemes and the Rest of the Desktop
  • Fonts
  • Wallpaper
  • The Window Manager
  • Bevels

Other cards

• Copyright Information

Scheme Files

The File

Plain text, one scheme per file, named with a .cyscheme tail. A version sentinel, a name, a scale, then one binding per line.

!cyscheme-1
!name:  Icy Blue Mountains
!scale: 1.0
! Lines starting with ! are comments.

Cy*BasicBackground:   #6f7f9a
Cy*TextForeground:    #000000
Cy*TopShadowColor:    #9fb0cc
Cy*BottomShadowColor: #3c4759
Cy*SelectFillColor:   #c8a05a
Cy*BevelScale:        1.0

Every binding line is also a legal X resource line. That is deliberate: the same text can be read by the scheme library, merged into the resource database, and inspected with an editor and xrdb.

The version sentinel must come first. A version this build does not know is a loud parse failure, never a guess. A role bound twice takes the last value and warns. A malformed line rejects the whole scheme with the file and line number.

Colour Values

Four spellings are accepted:

#rgb
#rrggbb
rgb:RR/GG/BB
a colour name

Names come from the X colour database. Blueprint ships its own rgb.txt, a union of the SGI, Linux and BSD lists, and falls back to the system's copy where one exists. So "midnightblue" and "papayawhip" are legal scheme values.

Whatever you write, the sampler and any editing path writes back the #rrggbb form.

Where Schemes Are Found

In this order. The first directory that has a scheme of a given name wins, so a copy of your own shadows a shipped one.

~/.cyanotype/share/cyscheme            your own; the only place anything is saved
<share>/cyscheme                       the shipped schemes
<share>/cyscheme/generated             the wallpaper-derived schemes
~/.cyanotype/share/cyscheme/generated  your own generated ones
the build tree, when running uninstalled

Two Names

A scheme has a file name and a display name, and they are usually spelled differently.

• The FILE name, minus the .cyscheme tail, is what the list shows and what the command line resolves. It is lowercase and dashed: icy-blue-mountains.
• The !name: line is the DISPLAY name: Icy Blue Mountains.

The wallpaper lock pairs a scheme to a picture by FILE name, exactly.

What Ships

icy-blue-mountains   the default, at the top of the shipped directory

and twenty-five generated from the shipped wallpapers, among them emerald-mountain, ice-castle, forest-of-fall, volcano-scene-at-night, winter-wonderland-illustration and snow-covered-trees-and-mountains.

Writing Your Own

The straightforward route is to start from a generated one:

cp <share>/cyscheme/generated/ice-castle.cyscheme \
   ~/.cyanotype/share/cyscheme/rivendell.cyscheme

then edit the !name: line and the bindings you care about, and apply it:

cyschemed --apply rivendell

A Note on the Writer's Comment

Schemes written by the editing path carry a comment saying they were written by cyschemed-prefs. That program no longer exists; its code was folded into the Background panel. The comment is stale and harmless.

Next

• The Scheme Daemon
• Command Line