Howto: Remove the borders of your desktop icon text

August 27, 2007 at 9:59 am | Posted in xubuntu | 20 Comments

Some themes, like Carbonit, theme the border of your desktop icons. Most of them, however, don’t, and they can leave your icons with ugly borders around the text. With this tip, you can get your icons looking like this:

Nice, huh? Let’s get started!

1) Open up a terminal, and create and edit a GTK configuration file:

touch ~/.gtkrc-2.0
mousepad ~/.gtkrc-2.0

2) Copy and paste in it the following:

style "xfdesktop-icon-view" {
XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0
}
widget_class "*XfdesktopIconView*" style "xfdesktop-icon-view"

You can also change the font colors.

style "xfdesktop-icon-view" {
XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0

base[NORMAL] = "#3F6BA4"
base[SELECTED] = "#3F6BA4"
base[ACTIVE] = "#3F6BA4"

fg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff"
fg[SELECTED] = "#ffffff"
fg[ACTIVE] = "#ffffff"
}
widget_class "*XfdesktopIconView*" style "xfdesktop-icon-view"

Gives the icon text a dark black background with white text.

3) Save the file and exit. You may need to log out and in again for the changes to take effect.

If you’d like, you can also make the icon text border transparent with your wallpaper. The end result would be something like this:

Looks nice? Here’s how you do it:

1) Open up a terminal, and create and edit a GTK configuration file:

touch ~/.gtkrc-2.0
mousepad ~/.gtkrc-2.0

2) Copy and paste in it the following:

style "xfdesktop-icon-view" {

XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 20
font_name="Sans Bold"

base[NORMAL] = "#ffffff"
base[SELECTED] = "#ffffff"
base[ACTIVE] = "#fefefe"

fg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff"
fg[SELECTED] = "#73B2D0"
fg[ACTIVE] = "#D17100"
}
widget_class "*XfdesktopIconView*" style "xfdesktop-icon-view"

You can change the number in XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha to your liking. Enjoy!

(Thanks to PrimoTurbo at http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3197338&postcount=435 for this tip!)