Ubuntu – How to change the color of the scroll bar

colorsguithemesunity

The scrollbars in Unity are of very low contrast, and I can't see where the bar is using just peripheral vision. I have to look at the scrollbar.

Look at Mac OS X interface and notice the blue, contrasting scroll bar. You don't need to look at it directly to have the idea where you are in the page.

How can I change it so that it has more contrast and I see where I am every time?

Best Answer

A bit late, but perhaps I've found a quite nice, easy GUI solution:

gnome-color-chooser Install gnome-color-chooser

scrollbar settings in Gnome Color Chooser

Highlights:

  • Completely GUI solution, no need to manually fiddle with ~/.gtkrc
  • Only changes the settings you check. Uncheck them revert to default.
  • Changes are applied as soon as you click Apply. No need to switch themes back and forth
  • No need of sudo (but changes are to your user only)
  • Applies to "legacy" scrollbars only (the ones that need to be fixed). The "overlay" scrollbar is not modified.

The changes are quite unobtrusive: it edits (or creates) ~/.gtkrc to include its own config file:

include ".gtkrc-2.0-gnome-color-chooser"

And that file is pretty slim too:

style "gnome-color-chooser-scrollbar"
{
  bg[NORMAL] = "#ACACAC"
  bg[PRELIGHT] = "#808080"
  bg[ACTIVE] = "#ACACAC"
}
widget_class "*Scrollbar" style "gnome-color-chooser-scrollbar"

Btw, I've picked the above colors out of experiments. They blend in nicely with Ambiance's "monochrome-ish" style, being just a bit darker (and thus more visible) than default.

Until Firefox gets overlay scrollbars, I'm quite happy with my custom colors :)

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