black font on black background in xfce terminal

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Confirmed as reproducible

Just fyi, I see this issue using: gnome-terminal on openbox, evolution email on openbox. I've read elsewhere of the the same issue with awesome window manager. No issues when using gnome3. Started to see it on getting gnome 3.4.1 updates. Evolution is almost unusable on openbox.

After further checking and testing, I've found that many existing gtk themes are not updated for gtk 3.4.x.

I've now selected the Adwaita theme, and the problems on evolution, gnome, etc where black text appears on black are gone. There also appears to be a need to have a ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini file with the correct gtk settings. This has been tested on an openbox environment, and I expect it is the same for xfce.

confirm on debian wheezy/xfce after last gtk upgrade.

ii libgtk-3-0:amd64 3.4.1-2 GTK+ graphical user interface library
ii libgtk-3-bin 3.4.1-2 programs for the GTK+ graphical user interface library
ii libgtk-3-common 3.4.1-2 common files for the GTK+ graphical user interface library
ii gtk2-engines:amd64 1:2.20.2-2 theme engines for GTK+ 2.x
ii gtk2-engines-pixbuf:amd64 2.24.10-1 pixbuf-based theme for GTK+ 2.x
ii gtk2-engines-smooth 1:2.14.3+deb5 Smooth theme engine for GTK+ 2.x
ii gtk2-engines-xfce 2.8.1-3 GTK+-2.0 theme engine for Xfce

Deleting ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xsettings.xml and re-login afterwards solved this issue for me.

I was able to fix this for all users by modifying /etc/xdg/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xsettings.xml. I changed:

- <property name="ThemeName" type="string" value="Greybird"/>
- <property name="IconThemeName" type="string" value="elementary-xfce-dark"/>
+ <property name="ThemeName" type="string" value="Adwaita"/>
+ <property name="IconThemeName" type="string" value="Tango"/>

There is no "Greybird" theme on my system nor can I find one in the repositories. The file is in the xfce4-settings package, but I wonder why gnome-terminal (or gtk) isn't reverting to something sensible when a non-existent theme is chosen.

For the command line inhibited that read this thread; on my Ubuntu 12.04 / XFCE system I was able to get Evolution's colors to be correct by using Synaptic package manager to install the "shimmer-themes" package. It includes the albatross, bluebird and greybird themes. Select one of these themes and Evolution follows the theme and looks good. Reading elsewhere it appears that Evolution wants a GTK3 theme. Later I installed some other GTK3 themes from gnome-look.org and Evolution is OK with any of them as well.

Also affects evolution. Only 2 out of 200 themes are readable.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1970933
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2000010

Guess what. A bug can't affect multiple packages. Sigh.

Does not affect 11.10. Bug appears after update to 12.04.

I experienced the same issue on my labtop (running ubuntu 12.10). I switched from unity to xfce4, and when I opened up terminal to type commands in, none of the text appeared. I disabled "use colors from system theme" as was recommended above, and this fixed the issue for me.

For some unknown reason, this problem showed up on my system recently (XFCE / Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS system with all updates).

Deleting ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xsettings.xml and logging in again didn't fix it for me. (See #7)

That file contains <property name="ThemeName" type="empty"/> so I don't know what theme is being used. I don't particularly want to specify a theme.

Another silly thing: the launcher uses gnome-terminal when you select "Debian X Terminal Emulator" as your preferred terminal emulator. (See Applications Menu: Settings: Preferred Applications: Utilities: Terminal Emulator)

My avoid-the-problem solution is to select xterm as the Preferred Terminal Emulator.

Still seeing this on 13.10 (saucy).

In trusty, you can install the shimmer-themes package, which contains the Greybird theme. Seems like this should should be a dependency of xfce4 or xfce4-settings.

In trusty: black font on black background on gedit tabs.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

#1322305 has a fix, but it is not incorporated yet?

Georg, why did you remove the duplicate status? Bug 1322305 has been fixed in utopic and it probably will not be fixed in trusty.