LXAppearance colors do not write to file.

files that need fixing

forgot to add replication details:
1) open lxappearance
2) click "Color" tab
3) check "Use customized color scheme"
4) change colors
5) click apply
6) note that although the lxappearance window itself respects the new settings, no other gtk program does
7) click close
8) open lxappearance
9) click "Color" tab
10) note that none of the color choices are saved, and "Use customized color scheme" is unchecked

I am using lxappearance from GIT revision f0945814186b2903c9899e8d91e640e3341fd2b9 of 2010-09-03 and I cannot confirm your problem. Setting custom colors works fine and when I open lxappearance again, the settings are still there. What version of lxsession do you use? You need 0.4.4 for this to work.

I currently do not have any version of lxsession installed on my computer, but lxsession-lite in the Arch repository is at 0.4.4. I'll try installing that when I get home, but I also do want to note that lxappearance doesn't seem to change the alternate table rows in a GTK+ app (which can be kind of annoying).

Having lxsession running while using lxappearance to change the colors doesn't seem to work for me.

Same for me. I'm not using lxde but just lxappearance standalone. Anyway, I don't think you can really override the theme color just setting gtk-color-scheme in ~/.gtkrc-2.0. The fact is that you will need something like

style "custom"
{
bg[NORMAL] = "#ebeaea"
bg[SELECTED] = "#4a5e7d"
base[SELECTED] = "#4a5e7d"
}
class "GtkWidget" style "custom"

instead.

Thought I would chip in on this, since it's been a while since the last activity, and I'm experiencing the same problem.

> be using openbox (3.5.2) and gtk2/3 applications
> run lxappearance 0.5.4
> set theme (e.g. numixBLUE, which provides gtk2 and gtk3 themes together)
> check "use customised colour scheme" in "colour" tab
> change colours (e.g. "selected items background" to #FF00FF)
> click apply
> settings apply to lxappearance window, but not to any other open (or newly-opened) application
> close and re-open lxappearance
> new colour is not applied to lxappearance window, but does appear in the "custom colours" tab

I decided to check what lxappearance actually wrote to my .gtkrc-2.0 file, and it wrote this inside the "gtk-color-scheme" string:

selected_bg_color:#ffff0000ffff\n

So rather than writing #ff00ff, it wrote #ffff0000ffff... maybe that's of interest?

Btw, I'm running Arch x86_64

Despite the fact the idea to redefine colors is very interesting, this is never going to happen since all themes except Raleigh redefine all the colors when loaded, therefore all colors set by LXAppearance are always ignored. The "Colors" tab should be removed from LXAppearance as useless, I'm sorry.

I was wrong it seems, it should work if lxsession is the session manager. Then I have to disable 'Colors' tab if it isn't because setting color will not work for 'pure' GTK+ environment.

I believe this issue is solved in recent release of LXAppearance (0.5.6) - now the LXAppearance will show correct message if run without LXSession as session manager, about why it's impossible to change colors in such setup. Thank you very much.