how to make konsole tabs more distinguishable

[Stephen Dowdy]

On 5/26/20 2:06 PM, test wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> when opening multiple tabs in a konsole window, the active tab is virtually
> indistinguishable from the tabs that aren't active.  How can I make the
> active tab more distinguishable, like giving it different a background
> colour?
> 
> I've tried to use the Colours settings in the System Settings to change the
> colour of active tabs, but there doesn't seem to be a setting for this.
> For most of the colour settings I can't tell what they affect, and there
> are too many of them to figure it out by trial and error, especially since
> changing the settings doesn't always apply them.
> 
> 

https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/applications/konsole/tabbarstylsheet.html
https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/stylesheet-reference.html
http://thesmithfam.org/blog/2009/09/10/qt-stylesheets-tutorial/
https://gist.github.com/codemedic/f11cc460b8d9544f9afc


There seems to be no standardized place for user storage of Qt stylesheets that i can determine,
so i suggest:

mkdir ~/.qt-css/

# the following (or some variant of it) came from the 'codemedic' site above at one point long ago
# it puts a blue bar at the top of the tab to highlight it from the other tabs.

cat > ~/.qt-css/konsole-tab.css <<"EOF"
QWidget, QTabWidget::pane, QTabWidget::tab-bar {
     background-color: rgb(45, 45, 45);
}
QTabBar::tab {
     color: rgb(120, 120, 120);
     background-color: rgb(45, 45, 45);
     font-size: 12px;
     height: 25px;
     padding-left: 4px;
     padding-right: 4px;
     border-left: 2px;
     border-right: 2px;
     border-color: white;
}
QTabBar::tab:selected {
     background: qlineargradient(x1: 0, y1: 0, x2: 0, y2: 1, stop: 0 #1e5799, stop: 0.08 #2989d8, stop: 0.15 rgb(45, 45, 45));
     color: #4F89CC;
}

QTabBar::tab:hover {
     background: qlineargradient(x1: 0, y1: 0, x2: 0, y2: 1, stop: 0 #1e5799, stop: 0.01 #2989d8, stop: 0.10 rgb(45, 45, 45));
     color: #4F89CC;
}
"EOF"

then use the controls in:
   Settings->Configure Konsole->[TabBar]->
     [X] Use user-defined stylesheet
and enter the path to your css file.


--or--

kwriteconfig5 --file konsolerc --group TabBar --key TabBarUseUserStyleSheet     true
kwriteconfig5 --file konsolerc --group TabBar --key TabBarUserStyleSheetFile    file://${HOME}/.qt-css/konsole-tab.css


I haven't figured out the (or any) way to signal via DBus to the konsole session that its properties changed, though, via something like:
qdbus ${KONSOLE_DBUS_SERVICE} /MainApplication

     qdbus ${KONSOLE_DBUS_SERVICE} /MainApplication org.qtproject.Qt.QApplication.setStyleSheet "file://${HOME}/.qt-css/konsole-tab.css"
# that works same as the kwriteconfig5 above), but
     qdbus ${KONSOLE_DBUS_SERVICE} /MainApplication  org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.PropertiesChanged
doesn't do the thing i want.  (it's a signal, not a method, so, try...)

     dbus-send --session --dest=$KONSOLE_DBUS_SERVICE --type=signal --print-reply /MainApplication org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.PropertiesChanged

that just times out.

If anybody knows how to signal konsole to re-read its configuration, that'd be awesome.

--stephen