MacOS – How to change the Lion menubar selection color

macosmenu barsnow leopard

I really hate the blue-purple color of the Lion (and Snow Leopard before it) menu bar selection. Isn't there some way to change this? I've tried tweaking everything, but Apple seems to have decided that we should all use this absurdly bright color unless we want to go totally monochrome and use Graphite (which I don't). I assume the same fix should apply to Snow Leopard.

Best Answer

System preferences > General > Appearance > [Blue|Graphite]

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Graphite will turn menu selection co lor to dark grey. Of course it's system wide so it also will change the color for other UI elements.

Modding

You will need :

Download SArtFileTool into ~/Downloads/SArtFile then copy and decompress the system art resource file :

cd ~/Downloads/SArtFile
cp /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreUI.framework/Resources/SArtFile.bin ./
./sartfiletool -d SArtFile.bin artfiles

Go into the artfiles directory and find 52.png 68.png 71.png files and modify them.

  • 52.png = "Blue" top menu text selection color
  • 68.png = "Blue" menu item text selection color
  • 71.png = "Blue" help menu item "Search" background color

Then recreate SArtFile.bin and put into place :

./sartfiletool -e artfiles SArtFile.bin SArtFile.new.bin
sudo cp SArtFile.new.bin /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreUI.framework/Resources/SArtFile.bin

Logout & log in again, menu should look something like this (I cheated and used the turquoise-ish files from "Lion Pulse" mod.)

modified menu

Additional remarks: The SArtFile is poorly documented for Lion, here's the explanation of the contents for Snow Leopard but Lion's is different. The selection in Finder is still the harsher blue, haven't looked into that yet.

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