Can I change gedit's background color without changing to another theme?

As wojox said, you can change Gedit's theme.

The gtksourceview page on the Gnome website has more information about gedit themes. (Gtksourceview is the name of the software component that displays text in gedit.)

Modifying Existing Themes

To modify the built-in themes, copy them from /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/styles/ to ~/.local/share/gtksourceview-2.0/styles/ and edit the text files.

Finding New Themes

You can find several themes in this git repository. It looks like you can install them with:

sudo apt-get install git-core
git clone https://github.com/mig/gedit-themes.git ~/.gnome2/gedit/styles

(This will allow you to run cd ~/.gnome2/gedit/styles ; git pull to get updates to these themes.)

Building Your Own

You can also try this online theme generator. I found that on this article about creating gtksourceview themes.


Here are a few steps to change the GEdit background color.

  1. Click on Text editor in the right-top corner.

    Reference Image

  2. Click on Preferences.
  3. Select Fonts & Colors.
  4. Make the right choice (Cobalt is my favorite).

Note: You can use Customized Color Schemes also.