[techtalk] Netscape Appearance?

[Robert Kiesling]

On Fri, 31 Dec 1999, Robert Kiesling wrote:
> > Sunnanvind <dodsangel at himlen.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > Anyone knows how to change the colours of netscape's widgets?
> > 
> > In the communicator directory, /opt/netscape/communicator on my
> > system, the Netscape.ad file lists all of the resources, which
> > you can cut 'n' paste into your ~/.Xresources.    
> 
> Okay, done it.. but what do I change? Where can I mess with the colours?
> I hate that eyepopping light grey.

Hmmm.  I didn't realize the file was so large.  Anyway, not quite
halfway through the file, you should find these lines, or similar:

Netscape*foreground:			Black
Netscape*background:			#C0C0C0


Probably that background is what you want to change.  
The color is given in Red-Green-Blue values, but there's 
a file that should be named /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt, that
tells you what colors your X server recognizes.  But that 
doesn't take into acount any of the facilities of the display.
The best color display I've seen is in GNU emacs, if you have
that installed, you can type

M-x list-colors-display   ;; (The 'M' stands for the Escape key.)

and Emacs will pop up a window with all of the colors that the
system recognizes.  (Or at least all of the colors that Emacs 
recognizes.)  Anyway, they're valid color names, so you can 
change the value of the rightmost field of the lines above; e.g.,

Netscape*foreground:			Black
Netscape*background:			Khaki

Then place these lines in a file called .Xresources (actually
it could be called anything, but .Xresources is used by convention),
in your $HOME directory.  Then, you can either type, or add to your
.login, .bashrc, .profile or whatever, the command:

xrdb $HOME/.Xresources

which adds the new colors to the X server's resource lists.  

Btw, Khaki looks pleasant on both my laptop (color LCD) and my
desktop Sparc (grayscale monitor), so I chose that color.  The
resources are specified to the _server_, not the client, so they're 
effective only on that machine.   (That is, if you rsh or telnet
to another machine to use Netscape, these resource settings are still
in use by the server).  It's a lot less complicated in practice than
describing it. :)  There are a lot of resource settings for all of the 
X clients, including the window manager and session manager.  I've 
included the .Xresources file from my Solaris system (because it has
more stuff in it) below.  

Whew!  Let me know if this helps, Sunnan.  Cheers!

Robert 

(snip, snip)
...............................................................

emacs.geometry: 80x37+0+0
emacs.background: Wheat
Emacs.font: -*-lucidatypewriter-medium-*-*-*-12-120-*-*-*-*-*-*
Emacs.menu*.font: -*-lucidatypewriter-medium-*-*-*-12-120-*-*-*-*-*-*
Emacs.menu*.foreground: Black
Emacs.menu*.background: LightGray
Emacs.menu*.buttonForeground: Black

XDaliClock*font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-500-*-*-*-*-*-*

Dtwm*Emacs*iconImage: /usr/local/share/emacs/20.5/etc/emacs.xbm

Maker.noPrivateMap: 1
Maker*visual: GrayScale
Maker.targetGrayRamp: 64
Maker.minimumGrayRamp: 1

Netscape*maxImageColors: 125
Netscape*foreground:		Black
Netscape*background:		Khaki

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