note to self....

Okay, here's a solution to one that's been bugging me for awhile:

The problem is that Mozilla Firefox 1.x under SuSE 9.2 KDE 3.3 has some weirdness with the text select foreground / background color. The fix for this was found [tweaked] from http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#prefs.

This fix is documented on the mozilla.org website for Mozilla, but this works [seems to] for Mozilla Firefox [curr ver 1.5.0.4], as well.

The tweak was that my X server didn't like the color names that were used in the example from the website - not sure why "green" or "white" are not being mapped by the X RGB color database, but using the [somewhat] standard HTML color hex number format ('#rrggbb', where rr == red, gg == green, bb == blue, and each color is a 2-digit (8-bit) hexadecimal color component value) seems to work fine.

Note that this fix might be possible in the ${ff_user_app_dir}/chrome/userChrome.css file, but I haven't found the CSS definitions of Firefox user interface elements, yet. That should exist, I believe, but it may be wrapped some sort of XUL implementation verbiage.

Anyway - here are the pertinent entries from my newly created ${ff_user_prof_dir}/user.js file [user.js did not exist by default for Firefox - simply create it and add whatever of the available Javascsript UI style commands are desired - the page linked above has more examples]:

// Set select colors for text:
user_pref("ui.textSelectBackground", "#00ff00");
user_pref("ui.textSelectForeground", "#000000");
// Select color for typeahead find is slightly different:
user_pref("ui.textSelectBackgroundAttention", "blue");
// Not clear when/if widgetSelectBackground ever gets called: let's find out.
user_pref("ui.widgetSelectBackground", "orange");

Notes:

For the shell variables used above -

${ff_user_app_dir} - this is the user's application config and state directory (typically something like $HOME/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/)

${ff_user_prof_dir} - this is the Firefox user profile directory (typically something like $HOME/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/${profilename} where ${profilename} is a string randomly generated for the [default] profile when Firefox starts up - usually the first time.

Labels: 1.5, 3.3, 9.2, color, config, firefox, fix, hack, kde, linux, mozilla, rgb, suse, x

This applies to Windows 2000 Professional Edition - it may apply to other versions of Windoze as well.

To prevent Windows from hiding portions of the menu until you hit that stoopid double-down arrow thing:

1. From the Start menu, select Settings, then Taskbar & Start Menu...
2. The Taskbar and Start Menu Properties window will open. Near the bottom of the window, uncheck Use Personalized Menus, and then click OK.

Since Excel doesn't respect the system level setting, you will need to do this again in Excel (and perhaps other MS Office components, don't know yet).

According to Univ of Indianna you will, and they seem to think it's a standardized procedure, even:

1. From the Tools menu, select Customize... .
2. Click the Options tab.
3. 1. In Office XP or 2003, under "Personalized Menus and Toolbars", check Always show full menus, and then click Close.
   2. In Office 2000, under "Personalized Menus and Toolbars", uncheck Menus show recently used commands first, and then click Close

Note that we got there by right-mousing the menu bar to get to the appropriate dialog.

Labels: fix, gui, menu, ms, win2k, win32, windows