I do gtk programming in C/C++, and generally I respect the principle that the color scheme is supposed to be determined by the user. Sometimes I do allow for a text area background to be configurable, tho.

It looks to me like you are trying to use text buffer tags to do this. I dunno how well that works, but it obviously won't create a uniform effect. You want to affect the text view which displays the buffer. From your code:

$TextView->modify_bg ('normal', $greyl);
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Does this not do anything? I am sure that is where you would set a black background.

My other comment is that depending on how specific what you want to do is, a better way might be to create a gtk theme (.gtkrc) with the colors you want and then set that via "gtk-settings" (this should be part of the perl API somewhere...). That's less useful if you wanted to set values for specific buttons, however.

BTW, the ubuntu default is not carved in stone, you can set your own default scheme from the command line:

gtk-chtheme

Hi guys,

Thanks for your answers. My script is a telnet client that displays ANSI colours. Most users are going to expect a black background for that (since it's been the default telnet colour scheme since the dawn of time). That's why, on this rare occasion, I don't want to respect the user's choice of desktop theme.

(The test script changes the colours of several widgets - I hope it's clear that I was trying to demonstrate that ->modify_bg works for most of the widgets, but not for textview.)

$TextView->modify_bg ('normal', $greyl);

This really does have no effect on the textview's background colour, at least not on my Ubuntu box, even if I change it to

$TextView->modify_bg ('normal', $redl);

The gtkrc-2.0 file is hard to override for some widgets. See Setting widget bg color in Gtk2

Here is a general purpose override for the gtkrc style file for the Text box. Notice the color of the cursor needs special handling.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Glib qw/TRUE FALSE/;
use Gtk2 '-init';

Gtk2::Rc->parse_string(<<__);

style "my_text" {
font_name ="sans 24"
text[NORMAL] = "#FFAA00"
base[NORMAL] = "#000000"   
GtkTextView::cursor-color = "red"
}

style "my_cursor"{
fg[NORMAL] = "#FF0000"
}

widget "*Text*" style "my_text"
__

my $window = Gtk2::Window->new('toplevel');
$window->set_title('Z');
$window ->signal_connect( 'destroy' => \&delete_event );
$window->set_border_width(10);
$window->set_size_request(400,400);

my $vbox = Gtk2::VBox->new( FALSE, 6 );
$window->add($vbox);
$vbox->set_border_width(2);

my $hbox= Gtk2::HBox->new( FALSE, 6 );
$vbox->pack_end($hbox,FALSE,FALSE,0);

my $ebutton = Gtk2::Button->new_from_stock('gtk-quit');
$hbox->pack_end( $ebutton, FALSE, FALSE, 0 );
$ebutton->signal_connect( clicked => \&delete_event );

# Create a textbuffer to contain that string 
my $textbuffer = Gtk2::TextBuffer->new();
$textbuffer->set_text('yadda yadda yadda');

# Create a textview using that textbuffer 
my $textview = Gtk2::TextView->new_with_buffer($textbuffer);

# Add the textview to a scrolledwindow 
my $scrolledwindow = Gtk2::ScrolledWindow->new( undef, undef );
$scrolledwindow->add($textview);
$vbox->pack_start($scrolledwindow, 1, 1, 0 );

$window->show_all();

Gtk2->main;

#####################################
sub delete_event {
Gtk2->main_quit;
return FALSE;
}
#######################################
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zentara, Khen1950fx, halfcountplus,

Thanks for your generous help. The code you offered does the job very nicely, and I've learned a thing or two about GTK from your posts.

Ron

#!/usr/bin/perl -d:throttle(0.2)
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