Overview of Colour Schemes

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

Colour Schemes

A colour scheme decides what colour everything on the desktop is. It does it by naming ROLES, not by colouring individual programs: a scheme says what BasicBackground is, what TextForeground is, what the bevel's light and dark edges are, and every application asks for the role rather than for a colour.

Change the scheme and the whole desktop changes together, because everything was asking the same questions.

Where the Controls Are

Two programs are involved and neither is called what you might expect.

the picker    lives in the Background panel, cywall
the daemon    cyschemed, which has no window at all

Choosing a scheme is done in the Background panel, which carries a Color Scheme list beside the wallpaper browser. There is also a standalone Color Scheme window if that is all you want:

cywall --canonical=scheme

The daemon is what actually serves the scheme to running applications. You do not interact with it directly; see The Scheme Daemon.

There was once a separate scheme editor program. It was folded into the Background panel, and the standalone binary is gone. If you find references to cyschemed-prefs, they are stale.

Fonts Are Separate

A colour scheme carries no font and a font scheme carries no colour. Any font scheme mixes with any colour scheme, and applying one leaves the other completely alone.

Some schemes that shipped before the split still carry font bindings inside them. Those are legacy; the font scheme wins wherever both exist. Fonts have their own panel and their own book; see Schemes and the Rest of the Desktop.

In This Book

• Choosing a Scheme
• The Roles
• Scheme Files
• The Scheme Daemon
• Command Line
• Schemes and the Rest of the Desktop

What Ships

One scheme sits at the top of the shipped directory, icy-blue-mountains, which is also the default. Twenty-five more are installed alongside it, each generated from one of the shipped wallpapers so that the desktop's colours and its background agree.