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I did a post a while back about customising the XFCE Whisker menu. I’ve expanded on this and rolled the customisations into a theme.

The theme is based on ARC-Darker. By based on, I mean it is almost a 100% copy. The only parts I’ve changed are the colours for Whisker menu and a slight tweak to the context menu to make it more visible on light backgrounds. I find the theme looks nicest with the ePapirus icon theme, but YMMV.

To install, download this file
Extract it and copy to its own folder in either /usr/share/themes or ~/.themes

If you previously customised whisker menu as per my previous post, you will need to remove or rename ~/config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css and run xfce4-panel -r to reload and reset the panel config.

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Recently, my washing machine (a cheap and cheerful Beko WM5101w) started to sound like a banshee when on a spin cycle. I’m a pretty hands on kind of guy, so I thought I’d take it apart and replace the bearings.

After some searching, I managed to find a bearing and seal kit for about £20. Bargain! I spent some time taking necessary bits off the machine – weights, pulley etc. Only to find that the outer drum is welded together. This means the inner drum can’t be removed and the bearings can’t be replaced. This is fairly common on washing machines in the last few years apparently. Just an FYI.

Are washing machines built to fail?
Washing machine welded drums why you can’t change the bearings

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Whisker menu is a nice, customisable menu/launcher type thing mainly used in XFCE. My main problem with it is that it draws itself as an app window, so isn’t affected in the same way as actual menus by XFCE themes.

This site has some information on the CSS needed to customise it. I’m not going to cover the same ground, except to say you need to put your custom CSS in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css and run xfce4-panel -r afterwards.

Here’s mine. Suck it and see.

whiskermenu-window {
background-color: #404040;
color: #ccc;
}
/* Make sidebar buttons match */
whiskermenu-window button {
background-color: #404040;
color: #ccc;
}
whiskermenu-window button:hover {
background-color: #808080;
color: #000;
}
whiskermenu-window button:checked {
background-color: #808080;
color: #000;
}
/* Make treeview match */
whiskermenu-window treeview {
background-color: #959595;
color: #222;
}
whiskermenu-window treeview:hover {
background-color: #404040;
color: #fff;
}
whiskermenu-window border{
border-color: #444444;
color: #fafafa; 
}