With Backdrop Style Manager, this is probably the most important theme tool in (Ns)CDE. This tool applies colors to the widgets, menus, applications and backdrops. As in CDE, it reads color information from the palette files in $NSCDE_ROOT/share/palettes and $FVWM_USERDIR/palettes. Palettes are the 16bpp color definitions (8 of them). This colors and border bg/fg/sel colors calculated from them are the base of the look of pretty much all of the things on the screen. Colors can be applied in 4 or 8 colors mode. Most notable palettes are Broica in 8-colors mode and Solaris (called Default on SunOS) in 4 colors mode.

Color Style Manager as most tools is written in FvwmScript with background shell helper and color calculation and generator routines. Visually it tries to be as much as possible similar to the original CDE, but since it has some new features, there are some new buttons and commands introduced. Tool has a list of the palettes (system + user), preview button which can temporary apply some palette on the current workspace backdrop and FVWM based applications (FrontPanel, other scripts ...)

As in Backdrop Style Manager there are Add and Delete button actions. System palettes cannot be deleted, while local can be added to $FVWM_USERDIR/palettes and applied immediately.

There are 8 spaces with colors from the currently selected palette (4 spaces in 4-color mode) and generated XPM file with all 40 colors displayed. Button Number of Colors calls transient window where user can select 4 or 8 color mode. System default on modern desktop is 8.

What is most important new feature in Color Style Manager are integration options. This are:

The last integration is used to integrate what default widget integrations cannot reach. For example Gkrellm skin or some terminal preferences. Qt/Qt5 integration is easy, since this toolkits can use their GTK engine to integrate self with GTK theme. All that Color Style Manager has to do is to define GTK engine in ~/.config/Trolltech.conf and ~/.config/qt5ct/qt5ct.conf for colors from the new palette to be used.

GTK2 and GTK3 are heavy work part. Here, we are using work derived from one CDE theme for XFCE desktop and GTK2 + GTK3, purified and adapted for NsCDE (see Section 19, “Credits”). This is written in python. If turned on, this will produce $HOME/.themes/NsCDE directory with the theme for GTK2 and GTK3, and will edit $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0 and $HOME/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini to put or change gtk-theme-name value.

If nscde_use_xsettingsd is set to 1 in the $FVWM_USERDIR/NsCDE.conf after applying new color theme, user's X Settings in $HOME/.xsettingsd will be adjusted and xsettingsd(1) daemon restarted for settings in GTK and Qt applications to be applied immediately. This option can be enabled by editing NsCDE.conf or during initial setup. NsCDE starts xsettingsd daemon with "-c $FVWM_USERDIR/Xsettingsd.conf" parameter. This file must be present if it was not installed by the initial setup procedure.

Key Bindings: