How can I change the text colour in a Plasma-desktop notification?

Question

I am using Plasma-desktop notifications for all kinds of things, often from scripts using kdialog or notify-send. My Plasma desktop uses a dark background with a light foreground (text). Until a few months ago, all was well, but after a system update (in May?) my notifications kept their dark background but started using dark text as well for the notification body. Hence, all I can read is the title.

I looked at my current colour scheme in ~/.local/share/color-schemes/*.colors, setting all text (Foreground*=255,0,0) to red, but the notification fonts did not change. This document provides some specifications and mentions that ForegroundInactive should be used for the body text. However, this may be in a section of the colour scheme that is currently lacking. Also, the document is about three years old.

I'm using KDE Plasma v.5.25.5 on Gentoo Linux.

How can I change the colour of the (body) text in my notifications?

Answer 1

You should be able to change the body text color of a notification in System Settings -> Appearance -> Colors. Here, click the edit icon of the currently selected theme and then select the "View Text" color. After you save and apply the changes (you might need to log out and log in again), the notification's body text should appear in the color you picked. Be careful here since this will change that color in other places, too. It seems it's a general setting for labels of some sort. Once you apply the change, you should basically see the new color immediately in the system settings window since it uses the same labels as the notifications themselves. It's better to copy the original value somewhere in case this results in too many changes in your system theme.

I'm not sure where you can change the color specifically for the notification body text without it affecting other parts of the system. According to this thread, it seems that the fact that notifications inherit the system colors is intended in the newer KDE Plasma versions. However, you can always try and change the color in the code directly but that seems like an overly invasive solution. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Luckas' answer pointed me in the direction of a workaround (rather than a solution):

In /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.notifications/contents/ui/NotificationItem.qml
@@ -230,7 +230,7 @@ ColumnLayout {
                         // HACK RichText does not allow to specify link color and since LineEdit
                         // does not support StyledText, we have to inject some CSS to force the color,
                         // cf. QTBUG-81463 and to some extent QTBUG-80354
-                        text: "<style>a { color: " + PlasmaCore.Theme.linkColor + "; }</style>" + notificationItem.body
+                        text: "<style>a { color: " + PlasmaCore.Theme.linkColor + "; } p { color: " + PlasmaCore.Theme.textColor + "; }</style><p>" + notificationItem.body + "</p>"
 
                         // Cannot do text !== "" because RichText adds some HTML tags even when empty
                         visible: notificationItem.body !== ""

While this does not solve my issue properly, at least I can read my notifications again. Since it took me several hours to reach such a trivial goal (not helped by the fact I had to log out and into Plasma after every change - you'll have to do the same after this edit), I'm sufficiently happy/annoyed to stop here.

However, this workaround may give some insight into the actual problem - I'm still very interested to hear any further suggestions.