file manager and media player with non-white background
 

I am looking to entirely get away from white backgrounds in the systems I use because it no longer serves any sane point for computers to attempt to emulate paper.

Better yet file manager and media viewer with customizeable backgrounds, toolbars etc.

Only non-apple and non-windoz tools will be considered. My OS is, you know, not a service and I do not want to be included in whatever hive they are building.

I figure vlc is open source, if anyone knows where to change the single piece of code that would disable the white background, maybe we could spend 15 minutes and just solve this issue.

bonus: if anyone knows how to prevent firefox from flashing a pure white screen every time you open a new tab, that would be greeeeeat.

That these issues persist through 2018, that developers or someone is still demanding white backgrounds for some or another sense of i dont know what, is something I find astounding.

95% of the worlds population has never likely still never viewed white text on black backround and noticed the strange, bizarre almost, sudden ease of reading, the sudden relaxation of pupil and retina....

Assuming you're using a GTK3-based DE?

Just apply a GTK3 theme with a dark background.

Some popular ones:

• Adapta
• Arc
• Materia

Watch /r/unixporn for ideas.

As for Firefox: I'm sure there are plugins to change the background color, but this should also work:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/qu...#answer-780742

I can fix most of it, but it's a LOT of unpaid work, since;

*Some devs compile generic color theme into their binaries, and these generic themes are always white.
*Some devs define rgb values in source code, so you'll have to re-define #fff into something else in multiple locations and.. recompile.
*Some web stuff relies on css 'background' being transparent, an image, or undefined, so when you define it; the site breaks out black font on black bg and similar nonsense.

Best I can do is try to help you with specific software that you want skinned, post a list of worst offenders or something. (I don't run vlc, maybe someone else can help with that)
For old firefox I know of several fixes, for the new one (60.x) there's 'color' under preferences where you can enforce black bg and it stops the flashes. (but it's global, all sites go black).
The problem I think, is the toolkit background hardcoded into #fff value, personally I blame google chrome and battery-saving lies.

Thank you this is helpful, will leave open for maybe some more ideas.

Dark reader works great for me and there are many but no matter which theme/plugin I try, it flashes white when I open a tap which in any dark environment is just unpleasant.

'lets make this all a dark theme but the flashes we are going to leave white, because bright flashes with computers are hard coded into the univere.'

@elcore thanks for dropping some serious knowledge here, I had a feeling it wasn't as easy as changing a value in .html then reloading.

If you dont use vlc, then what do you use that does same or similar?

Those are great IDE suggestions from dugan but what about file viewers? Why does it seem cross platform it is simply universally white? (besides the reasons you list, difficulty and obfuscation...)

I see tons of features in file managers that I never need and usually a set of UI tweaks that are underwhelming, ignoring the white elephant in the room ie dolphin.

Applying a dark GTK theme will change the file manager's background, if the file manager is GTK-based.

Did you say Dolphin though? Are you using KDE?

Then try materia-kde or adapta-kde. Both of them have dark-background Dolphins right on their homepages.

MPlayer, SMPlayer, qmmp (includes coloring tool).
Qt5 and Qt in general is great for skinning, qt5ct (3rd party skinning tool) options are extensive. It is unfortunate mozilla expects GTK+3 system theme, and has ignored Qt for like a decade.

Compare Qt tools to firefox color tool, as seen on this screenshot, it's not even close (but for me it's sufficient, as it does take care of white flashes).

Desktop Environment. not IDE. DE includes filemanagers.

Talked to one php web developer, he ranted about theme writers too and said some intereresting things.

Apparently, a large majority of artists writes these things on laptops with really weak backlights, and they can't actually tell the difference between #000 and #222
So when they write theme variant dark, the result is not actually dark on a proper workstation backlight. Furthermore, the #FFF looks 'pale' on laptops for the same reason.
They use #FFF for better visibility under low power conditions, and since nobody cares about workstations anymore, we're stuck with themes that shine like thousand suns.
I write all of mine with #000 base (because IRC was like that on monochrome, and I hated the 'modern' ICQ/AIM stuff that came later, which was all white).

As I said before it's a lot of never-ending work, and IMO it's the paid developer who should be pushed a bit to provide a different base (the guys in charge of mozgtk in firefox case).
Most of us here are not paid, and while it's possible to fork, it's not really a viable long term solution.

very true.

the opposite is true for web pages:
background is full white, but the text is very thin google font in #666 or so.
unreadable, unless you have a super-duper-hidpi apple device. a***holes.

that said, i much prefer #222 (or #111) to #000.

@all this is great stuff, very helpful and at least I understand why it is so difficult now and the state of the art.

The qt tip is great I will check it out for sure.