Selected line's contents aren't readable in GEdit while using dark theme on Ubuntu 20.04

I am unable to see what I type in the Gedit editor using dark theme.

Gedit problem showcase

This is due to the default setting of highlighting the current line.

Gedit highlight current line setting


Here's my workaround.

Go to the Preferences menu on Gedit and change the Color Scheme on Fonts & Colors tab:

Color Scheme on Preferences menu

Check if the text is now comfortably readable even with the presence of the highlighted content on the selected line.

Readable highlighted text


As you can see in the images, by default the Higlight current line feature is enabled in Gedit editor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal).

Due to that, you can't see what you type in the current line properly, since the font color and highlight color are almost the same.

You can disable Highlight current line in the preferences of Gedit or change the color of the text in Font & Colors settings.


You have two options:

  1. Open the theme file /usr/share/gtksourceview-4/styles/tango.xml with root access and around the line 50 there should be something like this :

    <color name="aluminium1"                  value="#eeeeec"/>
    

    Change the color to something less harsh like #99999c.

  2. Use another theme.The default theme when the global appearance is set to dark is tango but you can also use Classic or Oblivion depending on your mood and your preferences.None of them have the problem of unreadable text when a line is highlighted.Just go to Preferences -> Font and colors and change that.

Also you can take a look at this theme repository to find more themes if you want.