K-Menu - High-lighting a bit too subtle

[Duncan]

Bogus Zaba posted on Sun, 10 Aug 2014 17:58:36 +0100 as excerpted:

> KDE 4.10.5 as supplied with Slackware 14.1.
> 
> I sometimes need to use the K-Menu to find an application and when I do
> so, I find that the default way selected items are highlighted as you
> scroll along them with either mouse of keyboard is a bit subtle. I would
> prefer to be able to see more readily where my cursor is. This is
> especially true on my laptop where the screen needs to be a the right
> angle (and not too much sunlight interfering etc).
> 
> Is there anywhere you can configure this setting? Perhaps a theme?

"K-Menu" can mean several different things in kde4.  What type of k-menu, 
classic, kickoff, other?

If it's a classic style kmenu it should be a standard menu and should be 
configurable using the same settings as normal kde menus.  In particular, 
the general kde color scheme applies, along with the widget style 
selection.  Both of these are found (at least in the live-kde4 that I'm 
running now, approximating 4.14.0) in kde system settings under common 
appearance and behavior, application appearance, colors applet and styles 
applet.

Further in particular for menus, if you're running the default Oxygen 
widget style, you can hit the configure button to the right of the widget 
style selector to get a configure oxygen dialog with several tabs.  One 
of those tabas is menu highlight, which I had to play around with a bit 
in ordered to get a usable menu highlight.  Currently I have the radio-
button set to "Use selection color (subtle)".

If you're using the kickoff style kmenu, the behavior and configuration 
is totally different, as that's part of the plasma workspace, covered by 
its own settings and widget theme, not the standard kde color settings 
and widget styles.  Why the chose to have two entirely different sets of 
widgets configured in two entirely different places using two entirely 
different rulesets I don't know, as all it does is confuse people, but it 
has been that way for all of kde4, and won't be changing in kde4 now.  
What kde frameworks5 and plasma5 are doing with it I don't know, but one 
could hope they've done /something/ about that situation.

Anyway, yes, in that case the configuration is via theme -- there's no 
GUI for configuring specific settings and you may have to directly-edit 
the theme files if you can't find a theme that does what you want.  The 
configuration, such as it is, is still kde system settings but in an 
entirely different location, under workspace appearance and behavior, 
workspace appearance, desktop theme.

Other than changing the entire theme on the theme tab, you can switch to 
the details tab and "customize" by choosing among installed themes for 
each individual component.  For instance, you can use the default oxygen 
theme for most components but use the air theme for just the kickoff 
menu, if you like.

But as I said, beyond that, you pretty much have to manually edit the 
individual theme files directly.  It can be done, but it's not easy 
unless you want to become a kde4 plasma themes expert, and it's a bit 
late for that as the first releases of kde frameworks5 and plasma5 are 
already out, and will likely be shipping in distros next year, if not 
later this year for some, so you'd only have a relatively short time to 
use that expert knowledge.

Thus, if you're using the kickoff kmenu launcher, your best hope would 
appear to be trying different workspace themes, including those on kde-
look if you don't like what's built-in.

If you're using lancelot, that's a standard kmenu option so should be in 
most workspace themes as well, but IIRC it had some of its own quirks but 
I haven't used it in years and I don't recall the details.

If you're using some other kmenu launcher, it's either distro specific 
(and IIRC/AFAIK OpenSuSE does ship such a non-kde-default-component 
launcher) or something from kde-look.  What its config options might be I 
wouldn't venture, but you might check kde-look to see if there's an 
updated version and try it if so.  However, it's relatively unlikely 
you'll find many workspace themes that support it as it's a non-default 
component, so you may end up manually editing whatever theme the distro 
ships, or whatever the kdelook launcher applet supplies.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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