D.5.1 GTK+ Resource Basics

In a GTK+ 2 resource file (usually ~/.emacs.d/gtkrc), the simplest kind of a resource setting simply assigns a value to a variable. For example, putting the following line in the resource file changes the font on all GTK+ widgets to ‘ courier-12’:

gtk-font-name = "courier 12"

Note that in this case the font name must be supplied as a GTK font pattern (also called a Pango font name), not as a Fontconfig-style font name or XLFD. See Fonts.

To customize widgets you first define a style, and then apply the style to the widgets. Here is an example that sets the font for menus (‘ #’ characters indicate comments):

# Define the style ‘my_style’.
style "my_style"
{
  font_name = "helvetica bold 14"
}

# Specify that widget type ‘*emacs-menuitem*’ uses ‘my_style’.
widget "*emacs-menuitem*" style "my_style"

The widget name in this example contains wildcards, so the style is applied to all widgets matching ‘ *emacs-menuitem*’. The widgets are named by the way they are contained, from the outer widget to the inner widget. Here is another example that applies ‘ my_style’ specifically to the Emacs menu bar:

widget "Emacs.pane.menubar.*" style "my_style"

Here is a more elaborate example, showing how to change the parts of the scroll bar:

style "scroll"
{
  fg[NORMAL] = "red"     # Arrow color.
  bg[NORMAL] = "yellow"  # Thumb and background around arrow.
  bg[ACTIVE] = "blue"    # Trough color.
  bg[PRELIGHT] = "white" # Thumb color when the mouse is over it.
}

widget "*verticalScrollBar*" style "scroll"