The Roles

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

The Roles

A scheme binds names to colours. The names are the vocabulary, and they come from SGI's Indigo Magic scheme documentation with their casing intact, so that an IRIX hand recognises them.

Only two are required: BasicBackground and TextForeground. A scheme without those is rejected loudly. Everything else is either derived or falls back.

Ground and Chrome

BasicBackground        the neutral ground; flat surfaces
AlternateBackground    secondary panels, menu panels
TopShadowColor         the bevel's light edge
BottomShadowColor      the bevel's dark edge
SelectFillColor        the fill of an armed control
HighlightColor         the location cursor and keyboard focus
PanelBackdropColor     the backdrop behind panel contents

Selection

Three grades, used by the file manager and the desktop icons:

PrimaryHighlightColor     the active selection, a drag, a menu operation
SecondaryHighlightColor   what the pointer is hovering over
TertiaryHighlightColor    the other members of a multiple selection

Text and Wells

TextForeground           text ink
DisabledTextForeground   greyed text
TextBackground           plain text surfaces
TextFieldBackground      editable single-line wells
ScrolledListBackground   list wells
ReadOnlyBackground       text wells you cannot edit
TextSelectedForeground   selected text ink
TextSelectedBackground   selected text fill

Controls

ButtonBackground             push and toggle button surfaces
IndicatorBackground          the well behind a toggle indicator
ScrollBarControlBackground   the thumb and the arrows
ScrollBarTroughColor         the trough

Window Manager

WMBackground        WMForeground
WMActiveBackground  WMActiveForeground

These colour the window frames and title bars. See the Window Manager book.

Content Accents

Colours a program may ask for by meaning rather than by role:

HighlightColor1 through HighlightColor8
DrawingAreaColor
DrawingAreaContrast1 through DrawingAreaContrast4
IconViewCanvasColor    CatalogCanvasColor
WarningColor  ErrorColor  InformationColor
RedColor  YellowColor  GreenColor  OrangeColor
BlueColor  BrownColor  PurpleColor
CheckColor  RadioColor
AlternateBackground2 through AlternateBackground6
LinkForegroundColor  VisitedLinkForegroundColor  ActiveLinkForegroundColor
DarkColor  BrightColor

Pointer

CursorColor   the pointer's colour

Metrics

Two roles are not colours at all:

BevelScale    a multiplier on every bevel width
SpacingUnit   the base layout unit

Both default to 1.0 when a scheme leaves them out. BevelScale is how a scheme makes the whole desktop's chrome heavier or lighter without touching a single colour.

The Nine Font Roles

Nine font names are also legal in a colour scheme file, and shipped schemes still carry some of them. They are LEGACY. Fonts moved into their own scheme file, and the font scheme outranks anything a colour scheme says about type. See Schemes and the Rest of the Desktop.

What Happens to a Role You Leave Out

Some are derived from the ones you did set. Bevel edges, for instance, are computed from the ground colour when they are absent. Others fall back to a built-in value. A scheme that binds only a handful of roles is therefore a perfectly reasonable thing to write.

What Happens to a Role We Do Not Know

The file parser preserves it, so a scheme from a later version survives being read. Note, though, that unknown roles are dropped when the daemon publishes the scheme, so an unknown role has no effect today.

Next

• Scheme Files
• The Scheme Daemon