Tip: Green accent color for Glyphs

[FlorianPircher]

In Big Sur, applications can have an accent color to match the branding of the app: Notes is yellow, Music is red, Podcasts is purple, etc. Glyphs is using the standard blue color. The following line changes that to green:

defaults write com.GeorgSeifert.Glyphs3 AppleAccentColor 3

Relaunch Glyphs to see the effect. If you don’t like it, you can revert back by running this line:

defaults delete com.GeorgSeifert.Glyphs3 AppleAccentColor

This is what green Glyphs looks like:

[Tosche (Toshi Omagari)]

Looks amazing. Thanks for the tip, I’ve done that too!

[Mark (Mark Frömberg aka Mark2Mark)]

Glyphs doesn’t seem to use the standard blue color, but instead “just” follows whatever your system accent color is. So you could also change that. I guess then all the controls have the same chosen color.

[GeorgSeifert]

I didn’t look into this, but the defaults command seems to overwrite the system settings. I saw in the Big Sur announcements that an app even can define its own accent color. Didn’t like to overwrite the users choice.

[FlorianPircher]

The leftmost accent color (the rainbow) is the default accent color when setting up a new machine. It allows each app to express its own color or use blue by default.

[Mark (Mark Frömberg aka Mark2Mark)]

I know

[FlorianPircher]

@GeorgSeifert

the defaults command seems to overwrite the system settings.

There is a cascade of preferences:

• If the rainbow accent color is selected, then the color can vary from app to app.
  • If the app does not specify its own accent color, it’s blue.
    • user defaults can be used (as in the code above) to still force a specific color, if only from a predefined set of system colors (no custom RGB)
  • If the app does specify an accent color, then it can pick any NSColor it wants
• If an accent color different from the rainbow is selected, no app gets to use its own color; the user forces a system wide accent color.
  • user defaults can still be used to change specific apps, so a green Glyphs can still life in an all pink world

[GeorgSeifert]

This looks nice:

[FlorianPircher]

Indeed! File format version alerts never looked better.

[eliason (Craig Eliason)]

But doesn’t change everything, like selected glyphs in Font view, or selected Masters and vertical metrics labels in Masters tab of Font Info.

[FlorianPircher]

The highlight color is separate from the accent color. You can choose a custom highlight color for all applications in system preferences:

You can use the same trick as above to change the highlight color of just Glyphs:

defaults write com.GeorgSeifert.Glyphs3 AppleHighlightColor "0.34 0.74 0.4 Green"

Here, you can specify the red/green/blue components of the color, each in the range [0, 1]. Again, if you don’t like it you can undo the highlight color change like so:

defaults delete com.GeorgSeifert.Glyphs3 AppleHighlightColor

(If Glyphs specifies a custom accent color in a future version then that would also affect the highlight color.)

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Preview:

[yoshiyaabiko]

How do I get the Categories, etc. in Green?
Do I have to insert Code somewhere and if so how do I do that?

[FlorianPircher]

It appears you are using Glyphs 2. Glyphs 2 does not draw colorful icons in the sidebar, so changing the color has no effect.

[yoshiyaabiko]

Dammit!

[FlorianPircher]

Well, there is a simple solution.

[dannycalders (Daniel Calders)]

@FlorianPircher

Well, there is a simple solution .

Haha, good one! You had me tricked