Eclipse Papercut #10 – Eclipse on Ubuntu: Fixing the black background color in hover

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Lars Vogel

If you are using Eclipse on Ubuntu, the default color schema of Ubuntu uses white foreground on a black background for the tooltip colors. These colors are used by the Javadoc view and Declaration view and also for the tooltip hovers.

You can change these colors by editing editing the /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc file. The relevant properties are tooltip_fg_color and tooltip_bg_color. Just search for these values, the position changes sometimes between releases, currently they are at the very top of the file.

The following setting uses more reasonable colors.

tooltip_fg_color:#000000
tooltip_bg_color:#f5f5c5

About Lars Vogel

Lars Vogel is the founder and CEO of the vogella GmbH and works as Eclipse and Android consultant, trainer and book author. He is a regular speaker at international conferences, He is the primary author of vogella.com. With more than one million visitors per month this website is one of the central sources for Java, Eclipse and Android programming information.
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4 Responses to Eclipse Papercut #10 – Eclipse on Ubuntu: Fixing the black background color in hover

  1. Peter Davis says:
    December 4, 2012 at 1:33 pm

    You are my hero, this has been bugging me for sooooo long

  2. GianMaria Romanato says:
    December 4, 2012 at 11:00 pm

    there is a better fix which uses a file in your home directory and as such will not be lost if you upgrade the distribution http://devshards.blogspot.it/2012/10/how-to-fix-unreadable-eclipse-tooltips.html

  3. Daniel Medina says:
    December 4, 2012 at 11:45 pm

    I use Gnome Colour Chooser but your solution is simpler 😉

  4. Lucas says:
    December 6, 2012 at 8:07 am

    change Ubuntu’s default theme also helps. I change “Ambiance” to “Awaita” and it looks great.

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