Making the Konsole tab "activity" colour change more visible

I use KDE, and I use Konsole. I often have quite a number (10-20) of tabs open at the same time, and I find it very useful to be able to see if one of the background tabs has some activity in it, so I like the fact that the tab name changes colour when this happens.

What I don't like is that the colour change is so minor as to be pointless. It doesn't stand out in any way at all.

What I don't like next is trying to find out where in KDE to change the colour for the tabs with activity in them.

It's easy enough to find things like https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/applications/konsole/tabbarstylsheet.html which tell you how to change the colour of the selected tab (or all of them), but this says nothing about the colour of tabs with activity in their windows. There's a simple reason for this - CSS can't do that.

You can search through the entire Settings menus for Konsole and come to the conclusion that it's not possible to change it, and you'd be right - in Konsole, you can't change it - but you can in KDE…

These instructions are for KDE 4.12 (as found, for example, in Devuan Jessie).

To get active tabs which you can see as different from inactive ones, go to KDE - Settings - System Settings - Application Appearance - Colours - Colours (again) and select the "View" Colour Set. I've already saved you the bother of fiddling about with the "Window" or "Button" Colour Sets, because these are not the one you're looking for, despite the encouragingly likely-sounding names.

Click on the dull purple colour sample to the right of "Active Text" and change it to bright pink (I use HTML colour #FF00FF; it's third from the left on the bottom row of the "Forty Colours" selection).

Click on OK, click on Apply, and then any background Konsole tab which has activity in its window will show up as a dark purple colour, while all the others are black. It doesn't show up as the actual colour you selected, because it's created from some sort of mixture with the non-active colour (which is black, hence it tends to make anything you select darker than you originally expected), but I find this sufficiently different from black that it is noticeable, and does the job.

Bright green (colour #00FF00, left hand end of the middle row) might be good for some people, but my eyes don't like the green-on-grey result so much as the purple.


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