How to change the color of a Rainmeter Skin on Windows 10
Rainmeter skins don’t usually come with color variations. In some cases, they might have light or dark themes but users cannot freely change the color of a Rainmeter skin. This is because a skin has lot of different UI elements that make it up. This includes images as well as text. That’s why changing the color of a Rainmeter skin can be a bit hard. Here’s how you can do it.
Text Based Rainmeter Skin
For a Rainmeter skin that is entirely text based e.g., one that displays a simple digital clock and does not use any image sources, it’s pretty easy to change the color. If you’ve got such a skin, right-click it and select Edit Skin from the context menu.
This will open the skin’s configuration file in Notepad. In this file, you want to look for ‘Font Color’ and all other instances of values that mention color. Replace the value for it with the RGB value of the color you want to display the skin in.
A single skin file may have multiple occurrences of Font Color, and you will need to change the value for each one. I’m changing the color for this skin from black to green. For this simple skin, the color had to be changed in three different places.
Save the change, and refresh the skin.
Image & Text Based Rainmeter Skin
This is going to be much harder. Find a skin that uses both text and images. You will need an image editor to change the color of the image because Rainmeter will load the image as it is provided in the skin’s resources. It cannot apply a color mask to it.
This is the original skin.
Right-click the skin, and select Edit skin from the context menu. Go through the file that opens and note down all occurrences of any color related values. For example, the skin we’re editing has skin color, time color, and line color. Next, look for all images it uses.
For the Skin color, time color, line color, etc., value, you can edit the Notepad file and enter the new color. We’re going with green again. We’re not making everything green because, given how the skin is designed, it will make things impossible to read. We’re changing the line color of the skin to green, and the color of the image used to a bright orange so that the difference is easier to see. No text is being used in this skin so there’s no text color to change.
To change the color of the image used by the skin, go to your Documents library and open Rainmeter\Skins\NameOfSkin.
Inside, you will find a folder called Resources which will contain all the images used by the skin. In some cases, the images might just be located at the root of the skin’s folder. You should know the name of the image you need to edit from the Notepad file. Change its color using an image editor (use Paint.net). Replace the image inside the skin’s folder with the one you edited. Make sure the new image has the same name and extension has the original image.
Refresh the skin.
You can see that the color for more images needs to be changed in order for the skin to look good but the green and orange have changed as per the edits. The image that was given a different color is called time.png and it is one of the images the skin uses.
If you’re going to change the color of a Rainmeter skin, it’s a good idea to find a good theme first and then set about doing it. This is something that will take time, and maybe a little trial and error.
