Howto make Gnome fonts black
You can change to any colour. But the main issue is, for reasons of graphic aesthetic but not good GUI practice, theme designers for desktops make fonts a shade of gray. Computer screens are not pieces of paper—fonts should be black.
With modification, this likely works on all Gnome‐based desktops. That includes Ubuntus, Linux Mint, etc.
Need to modify the theme
You’ll find online talk about ‘Gnome Tweaks’. Don’t need it. Avoid loading crap on your machine.
There’s no slider for this. You need to make a new theme, modify the theme for black fonts, then load. Changing to ‘High Contrast’ desktop makes other changes, ugly changes.
All instructions for Linux Mint but, as I say, with mods, can be done in any Gnome system.
Get name of current theme
Start > Preferences > System Settings > Theme
or,
Start > Preferences > Theme
Look for the theme name. If themes are broken down (they are in Linux Mint), Look for the ‘Applications’ theme’. Note the name—examples use ‘Mint‐Y‐Aqua’.
Copy the theme and rename
This goes to a userspace folder on the path for checking themes,
cp -r /usr/share/themes/Mint-Y-Aqua ~/.themes/Mint-Y-Aqua-blackfonts
Open the CSS file
This for Linux Mint. In other systems, you may need to root about. Also, I say ‘xed’ for speed. It doesn’t matter, you’re in userspace, could use ‘nano’, ‘emacs’, etc.
xed ~/.themes/Mint-Y-blackfonts/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
Find colour value for Textview widgets and change
The ‘textview’ widget is a widget used… to display text. That means your text editor,
CTRL‐F ”textview text”
Change the value from a gray, likely,
color: #303030;
to black,
color: #000000;
Save and close.
Provoke the system to look for themes
The usual advice is a computer reboot. Note, with modern suspends, UEFI and so forth, this may need to be a powered ‘Shut Down’ and start, not a ‘Restart’. If in a Gnone Shell based desktop, like Linux Mint’s Cinnamon desktop, try,
ALT + F2, type ‘R’, then ENTER
Switch to the new theme
Here at the ‘Preferences’ menu again,
Start > Preferences > System Settings > Theme
or,
Start > Preferences > Theme
If themes are broken down (they are in Linux Mint), look for the ‘Applications’ theme’. Choose the ‘Mint‐Y‐Aqua‐blackfonts’ theme. In Mint there are a huge number of themes, on an irritating rotating display. New registered themes should appear at the start of the list, not in alphabetical order, which is smart.
If the theme has been registered, switch to the new theme.
Test
Open up ‘xed’, or start a new document, then try typing. Font color should be black.
Comments
On an issue that goes back years? That people from forums to Dedoimedio have complained about? I’m not Gnome—not me.
References
Thanks, but out of date,
Life is wonderful, change anything, blah, blah,