Choosing a Scheme

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

Choosing a Scheme

The scheme picker lives in the Background panel, cywall, in a column headed "Color Scheme" on the right of its Pictures page.

The controls there are documented in the Background book, which covers that panel as a whole:

cyhelp --book Background --topic schemes

This page covers what is true of the scheme itself, whichever way you pick it.

The Standalone Color Scheme Window

If the wallpaper is not what you are after, the same picker opens on its own:

cywall --canonical=scheme

A single window titled "Color Scheme" holding the heading and the scheme list, and nothing else. No lock, no sampler, no preview. It is the smallest way to change the desktop's colours.

By contrast, the plain background panel has no scheme column at all:

cywall --canonical=wall

What the List Shows

The name in the list is the FILE name, without its .cyscheme tail: lowercase and dashed, such as icy-blue-mountains. That is also the name the command line takes.

The scheme's own display name, "Icy Blue Mountains", lives inside the file and is what the daemon publishes. See Scheme Files.

Schemes of your own are marked so you can tell them from the shipped ones.

The Lock, and Why Names Match

"Lock scheme to wallpaper" is on by default, and while it is on the scheme follows the picture you choose.

The pairing is by FILE NAME, exactly, one to one. That is why the shipped schemes are named after the shipped wallpapers, and why a scheme built by the sampler takes the picture's name: so that it pairs afterwards.

A scheme with no matching wallpaper is still perfectly usable; unlock the scheme list and pick it.

Nothing Happens Until Apply

The Background panel's Apply is what writes the settings and asks the daemon to switch. Selecting a scheme in the list changes nothing on its own.

If Nothing Changes

Apply hands the scheme to the daemon and does not wait for an answer, so a scheme the daemon could not load is not reported back to the panel. Two things to check.

First, whether a daemon is running at all and what it thinks is current:

cyschemed --status

Second, whether the application you are looking at follows schemes live. Older Motif applications read their colours once when they start; see The Scheme Daemon.

Next

• The Roles
• Scheme Files
• The Scheme Daemon