Question

Ubuntu 10.04.1 new theme has by default all windows background colors set to black.
I don’t want to change that.

In Eclipse, the interface didn’t change much due to 10.04.1 – except for one annoying thing:
when the mouse hovers over a keyword – a variable for instance – the type (…) of that keyword is displayed in a small pop-up window.
The problem since 10.04.1, is that the text is in black color while the background is also black.

Is there a way to change that background color in Eclipse?

Answer 1

Update Dec. 2018: as mentioned in howlger‘s answer, Eclipse Oxygen 4.7 (June 2017) does now include a way to configure the background color in popups:

See “Colors in interactive popups“

Interactive popups like JDT’s Quick Outline don’t use the platform’s tooltip colors any more, since those were sometimes hard to read.

Old style:

New style:

• Go to Window > Preferences: General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts
• and change the Basic > Information background color.

In that same Colors and Fonts section, you will find:

• Code assist

  • Basic > Content Assist background color -> change
  • Basic > Content Assist foreground color -> change

• java doc

  • Java > Javadoc background ( overrides default: information background color) -> change

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Original answer (2010-2012)

All the various popup background color are managed in Preferences > Java > Editor (like the one for the completion list popup in bug 133615).
Other background colors are in General > Appearance > Colors and Font (type background in the filter field).

But the type popup seems to stick to a system color, which is why you see a black background.
If this is truly the case, it is worth reporting as a bug.

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The OP confirms it is not the case, actually:

It was in Preferences > C/C++ > Editor > Source hover background, and had to untick the “System default” (because the shown color was light-gray!)

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On Ubuntu 12.04+, the post “How to change tooltip background color in Unity?” also mentions:

/usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

The recent post (December 2012) “Eclipse Papercut #10 – Eclipse on Ubuntu: Fixing the black background color in hover” (from Lars Vogel) confirms:

The relevant properties are tooltip_fg_color and tooltip_bg_color.
Just search for these values, the position changes sometimes between releases, currently they are at the very top of the file.

The following setting uses more reasonable colors.

tooltip_fg_color:#000000
tooltip_bg_color:#f5f5c5

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pointhi adds in the comments:

I also had to set the environment variable SWT_GTK3=0 before starting eclipse to get it working.