Inspired by attempts to make Wine’s theme match the Human theme in Ubuntu, I tried to write a script to scrape colors from Gnome and apply them to Wine automatically, so the themes match no matter what theme you’re using in Gnome. (Of course it would be best to have actual theme support, but current implementations are uselessly slow.  Making the color scheme match is a good start.)

Download script

The latest version of the script is posted on Launchpad, though I haven’t exactly figured out how to use Bazaar yet…

As of this edit, it works pretty well for some themes, but not others.  I’ve been told that my first all-in-one attempt was in vain, since each GTK engine is free to use GTK’s colors in whatever way it wants, so scraping from GTK directly as I am doing will only work some of the time.  To really do it correctly, I guess I would have to make separate color mappings for each GTK engine.  That doesn’t sound like fun.

Making the fonts match is also important, which isn’t covered by the script.  You can see in my screenshots that I’ve set the winecfg fonts to match Gnome, but I can’t figure out how to set the others.

Screenshots

It works pretty well for Clearlooks themes:

It (surprisingly) works pretty well for Ubuntu Studio’s theme:

At first I thought it wasn’t working for Darklooks, since Notepad looks nothing like Gedit, but then I noticed that certain GTK windows do look the same as Wine windows, so I have no idea what they’re doing with Darklooks:

There is apparently no way to scrape the title bar color from GTK (I’d have to go into each engine to figure out which colors they use), so I just have it using the selection color, which matches Clearlooks themes decently.  It’s a compromise anyway, since the drawing/shading/gradients of the title bars are completely different:

An example of an engine that doesn’t work is Resilience.  They use a different set of colors for the menus than the ones I am scraping, so the menu colors are not only mismatched, they are unreadable:

Wine color values

Although I wasn’t immediately successful with the script, I did figure out what all but one of the color values in the Windows/Wine registry do, which I couldn’t find in any concise list elsewhere. (In Windows registries, "name"="data" pairs are called “values”. See Windows Registry on Wikipedia.)

Some of the Windows registry colors I could find online, but others I had to reverse engineer by changing the registry to obvious colors and restarting the Wine software/Windows. I’ll explain them all here so you don’t have to go through the same work. There are 31 possible color values, which are the same between Wine and Windows XP registries, but have different names in the winecfg configuration dialog (which is called Configure Wine in the Gnome Applications > Wine menu under the Desktop Integration tab):

Wine/Windows registry	Wine Configuration Item
ActiveBorder	Active Border
ActiveTitle	Active Title Bar
AppWorkSpace	Application Workspace
Background	Desktop
ButtonAlternateFace	Controls Alternate Background
ButtonDkShadow	Controls Dark Shadow
ButtonFace	Controls Background
ButtonHilight	Controls Highlight
ButtonLight	Controls Light
ButtonShadow	Controls Shadow
ButtonText	Controls Text
GradientActiveTitle	Active Title Bar Gradient
GradientInactiveTitle	Inactive Title Bar Gradient
GrayText	Gray Text
Hilight	Selection Background
HilightText	Selection Text
HotTrackingColor	Hot Tracked Item
InactiveBorder	Inactive Border
InactiveTitle	Inactive Title Bar
InactiveTitleText	Inactive Title Text
InfoText	ToolTip Text
InfoWindow	ToolTip Background
Menu	Menu Background
MenuBar	Menu Bar
MenuHilight	Menu Highlight
MenuText	Menu Text
Scrollbar	Scrollbar
TitleText	Active Title Text
Window	Window Background
WindowFrame	Window Frame
WindowText	Window Text

In Wine Configuration there’s one more option called “Message Box Text”, but you can’t change its color. Some of these colors only appear in certain configurations, so they were hard to figure out. Here are the functions of each, as near as I can determine:

Buttons and 3D objects

• ButtonHilight — Outermost button highlight, also used for text shadows on grayed-out buttons
• ButtonLight — Inner lit up edges of buttons, usually set to the same color as ButtonFace
• ButtonFace — Button background
• ButtonText — Color for 3D object text and other glyphs (Maximize symbol, drop-down arrow, etc.)
• ButtonShadow — Inner shadow of buttons, also used for grayed-out button text
• ButtonDkShadow — Outermost shadow of buttons, usually black
• WindowFrame — The glow around the widget that is currently in focus

These colors are also used for every other 3D object, like tabs, borders, drop-down boxes, etc.

I still can’t figure out what “ButtonAlternateFace” does. This is used by the registry in Windows XP and in many Wine themes online. (By default, no colors are defined in the Wine registry and it just adopts a Microsoft-esque color scheme, but they are defined in an actual Windows XP registry with the default Windows Standard Classic theme.) As far as I can tell, the “ButtonAlternativeFace” value seen around the web is just a misspelling.

Window decorations

The equivalent names for active and inactive windows aren’t instantly obvious in alphabetical order:

	Active window	Inactive window
Title bar text	TitleText	InactiveTitleText
Left end of title bar	ActiveTitle	InactiveTitle
Right end of title bar	GradientActiveTitle	GradientInactiveTitle
Window border	ActiveBorder	InactiveBorder

Menus

There are actually two different ways to display menus; 3D menus and flat menus. This is set by flipping one of the bits in the UserPreferencesMask value in [HKEY_CURRENT_USERControl PanelDesktop], as described in Tony Schreiner’s WebLog. I had no idea. I don’t know why flat menus aren’t the default in Wine. They seem better.

• Menu — Background for menus, also background for menu bars in 3D mode
• MenuBar — Background for menu bars. Not seen with default 3D menus
• MenuHilight — Selected item background Highlight for flat menus. Not seen in default 3D menu mode; Hilight is used for this, instead.
• MenuText — Menu text

Selections

• Hilight — Background of selected text, background of selected menu item in 3D menu mode
• HilightText — Selected text itself
• HotTrackingColor — Hover color for single-click navigation, like links or single-click mode in Windows Explorer

ToolTips

• InfoText – Tooltip text
• InfoWindow — Tooltip background

Backgrounds

• AppWorkSpace — Background color of multiple-document interface (any program that lets you Tile and Cascade sub-windows inside of a main window)
• Background — Background color of the Windows desktop (or virtual desktop in Wine)
• Window — Background color of notepad, for instance

Scroll bar

• Scrollbar — Background of scrollbar

This is only visible in a few applications. I see the color in Firefox, for instance, but not in Notepad, IE, MS Word, system tools, or anything else in Windows. I don’t get it.

The scroll bar buttons and handles are just colored the same as any other 3D button, but the background of the bar is just a gray in most apps, no matter what you set this value to.

In Wine, it colors the bottom right corner of Notepad, between the scrollbars, but not the scrollbars themselves. I’m not sure what this means.

Text

• WindowText — Text in Notepad, for instance
• GrayText — Grayed out text in windows, like labels for unavailable widgets