[Geany] Unable to change colors in editor

[Pascal Bernhard - SCI]

Hi all, 


I recently installed AntiX-Linux on an old IBM Thinkpad and this was my first encounter with Geany, which is its default editor. The issue I have with Geany (version 0.21) is that I am not able to modify or change the colorscheme. I had a few looks into the manual and as far as I understood it (Apparently, I do not seem to have understood its section on styling very well), you would have to change the colors in the default styling section in the filetypes.common file to have a different background, font color, etc. I tried that with the help of the tool 'Color Chooser'. No modification had any effect on the look of Geany during my first shots at modifying the colorscheme. During the first tries I could tweak the highlighting settings for the current line in the editor, not any more, now it stays the same. The editor (I'm not talking about the toolbar) still keeps an ugly glaringly green/turquoise background with a font in a darker green (I can change the font type). What I did was pick a color in the 'Color Chooser' tool, say #87A7B1 and then put 0x87a7b1 in the place where I figured I had to put this value to the change the color. Was that wrong?
After each try I reloaded the configuration via 'Tools' > 'Reload Configuration' without any effect.

So I looked on the internet and all tutorials told me to apply changes to the filetypes.common configuration. What I do not understand, is that all the colors mentioned in filetypes.common have nothing to do with the colors actually used for the editor. The background should be white not green/turquoise and so on. What am I missing here?

Eventually I downloaded some sample colorschemes from Codebrainz' geany-themes on GitHub and installed them like recommended. That worked fine, I can select the colorscheme via 'View' > 'Editor' > 'Colorschemes'. In addition I linked the colorschemes menu in my HOME-folder ~/.config/geany to the 'central' folder under /usr/share/geany.

Unfortunately the installed colorschemes do not or only partially look like the screenshots I found on GitHub. Some barely differ from that green default, and all have green (There are different hues of green, it's not all the same sort of green) as the highlighting color for the current line. I grep'ed through all files on my system for the string #00FFFF, which 'Color Chooser' identified as that horrible default background, to find out where Geany got that color from, as it is not mentioned in filetypes.common. None of the places grep found had anything to do with Geany, as far as I can tell. That's a puzzle to me! 
I tried to set a different colorscheme as the default in filetypes.common and geany.conf like tango.conf, say, but still the default scheme gets loaded with these weird green colors. Interestingly I had booted a Puppy Linux and looked into its Geany settings. The filetypes.common files seem to be identical, but on Puppy Linux, the font is black whereas the editor's background is white (As I would expect from the styling settings in filetypes.common. Modifying the styling on Puppy also didn't have any effect there.

By now I'm kind of lost, increasingly frustrated and I cannot resist doubts about my intellectual abilities anymore. So far I had successfully modified quite a few XML-files for window managers under Linux, but Geany's settings (These are not XML, I know) seem to escape me totally....

Thanks for your help,

Pascal