Pidgin Dark Background

Changing the background color in pidgin

It took a lot of digging as well as use of a debugger/inspector called gtkparasite, but I am now able to configure pidgin with dark backgrounds. The key is setting custom gtk2 values for interface elements. I created the following file in ~/.purple/gtkrc-2.0.

Here's an example of what it looks like:

Figure 1: Example Dark Chat Window

Here's the contents of ~/.purple/gtkrc-2.0 to generate the above.

style "molokai"
{
        text[NORMAL] = "#F8F8F2"
        base[NORMAL] = "#1B1D1E"
}

style "yellowonred"
{
        text[NORMAL] = "#FFFF00"
        base[NORMAL] = "#330000"
}

widget "*pidgin_conv_entry" style "yellowonred"
widget "*pidgin_conv_imhtml" style "molokai"
widget "*pidgin_conv_userlist" style "molokai"