Member Avatar for mferarri

Hi DaniWeb,

I'm getting a light blue background in the text box.
I don't know why this is happening or how to fix it.(it's usually white)
Please see below for screenshot.

http://imgur.com/UYg9srD

If anyone can help me it would be much appreciated.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by cereal

Dani AI

Generated

Useful follow-up tied to the thread: the blue editor background turned out to be a display colour‑depth problem rather than a Geany colour‑scheme bug, as reported. When the X server or a remote/VM session is running with a very small indexed palette (for example a 16‑colour mode), GTK/Scintilla theme colours get mapped into that palette and can look wrong (white mapped to blue, etc.). ’s config checks are sensible, but if theme settings look normal, inspect the display colour depth next.

Quick diagnostics (X11):

xdpyinfo | grep -i 'depth'

If that shows a low value (4 or 8), the session is palette‑based. Also open another GTK app (eg. a simple text editor); if it also shows wrong backgrounds, the issue is system/connection level, not Geany.

Common fixes and places to look

  • Remote desktop / VNC: request true colour (24/32‑bit) on the client/server. Example for VNC servers:
    vncserver -geometry 1280x800 -depth 24 :1
  • Virtual machines: enable 24/32‑bit colour, raise video memory/3D accel and install Guest Additions or equivalent.
  • Xorg persistent change (advanced): add a Screen section forcing 24‑bit depth (backup configs first):
    Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
  Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

    Only change X configuration if comfortable; reboot after editing.

Troubleshooting reminders
Restart Geany after any display change (GUI toolkits pick visuals at startup). If true colour is set but the problem remains, check GPU drivers/compositor or test in a Live session or a fresh user account to determine whether it’s global or user‑specific. This is a display‑colour issue — switching back to true colour restores the expected white background.

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for cereal

Check the color scheme inside .config/geany/geany.conf. Before editing the value, close Geany otherwise the current window will overwrite your changes.

Member Avatar for mferarri

Thanks for your response cereal, inside the config file it says "color_scheme= ", so this probably means that I have to set the color scheme back to default. I don't think I ever changed the color preferences before, so I don't know how this could of happened all of a sudden.

  • I tried modifying the .config file "color_scheme=default" but it didn't work.
  • I tried "color_scheme=Default" but it didn't work.
  • As I was doing this I made sure Geany was closed and I saved the .config file.
  • I tried re-installing Geany from Synaptic Package Manager but it didn't work.

I'm out of ideas now. Help?

Edited by mferarri because: clarification
Member Avatar for cereal

Yup, check if in ~/.config/geany/colorschemes/ there are files and set one of those as default, for example: color_scheme=github.conf, include the extension, if there aren't any files then you have two choices:

  1. reinstall Geany, so uninstall the programm and delete the configuration folder under your profile, i.e. ~/.config/geany/, not the .config directory itself, because it contains other software data;
  2. download some themes and save them to the colorschemes directory and edit geany.conf.

Note: I'm suggesting to edit geany.conf because the switcher interface doesn't work properly. Hope it helps, bye!

Member Avatar for mferarri

You know what? I got it. It had nothing to do with the color scheme. It was to do with the amount of colors the screen was displaying. When the screen was set to 16 colors, it displayed a blue background for some reason. But when I switched it back to true colors, the background became white again.

Thanks for your time and patience cereal.

Member Avatar for cereal

You're welcome and thank you for sharing the solution :)

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