GTK application appearance? How do you set which theme configuration you use for GTK applications? Currently pidgin looks terrible on my desktop. I set Widgets to a dark theme but it has no effect on my GTK applications hoenstly.

ahh okay. i noticed some themes just don't import at all for whatever reason.

Does your system have GTK_PATH or GTK2_RC_FILES set?

Oh. How would I check that?

In a terminal, run the following two commands, and paste the output here.

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echo $GTK_PATH
echo $GTK2_RC_FILES

You can use Konsole to do this.

I'm not sure if I'm up to date with the whole thing, but at least it used to be (and to me it still seems to be) that, there are the KDE themes for KDE apps, and GTK themes for GTK apps, each one in principle with no relation with each other whatsoever.

But then there are some "hacks" such as gtk-qt-engine (perhaps gt-gtk-engine) and qtcurve. Both have the intent of giving GTK apps a given KDE theme.

The first one does that by attempting to "convert" a "real" KDE theme into a GTK theme; the second one has a set of "internal" themes, for both KDE and GTK, and a theme-setting GUI that will generate the same settings/tweaks of a given (internal) theme for the GTK and the KDE theme at the same time, more or less as if it was just one theme.

I think the first one would also create a "GTK theme settings" (or something like that) on KDE's control panel. Perhaps the other does too, or that's independent, I don't know. I'm using qtcurve, and I've set the GTK theme via the "lxappearence" app.


To me it seems that qtcurve is somewhat better (and less buggy, if you google about gtk-qt engine you may find more informed opinions in this regard, I think it has even some bugs that affect other apps, like causing one app or another to fail to start), but recently, with the whole Gnome 3 thing, some GTK apps are apparently "immune" to any theme changing, does not matter where I try to set. I think it may work if we log into a gnome3 session and set the theme over there (it would only work with qtcurve I think), but I don't know because I think I don't have a working gnome 3 workspace.

On my system I have Oxygen Gtk, which styles Gtk applications such as Firefox and Transmission perfectly fine.

I've coincidentally stumbled with a similar topic in a different forum, see if that helps you:

shmerl wrote:Not sure about Squeeze, but in testing I installed gtk2-engines-oxygen which mimics KDE oxygen theme in GTK. Then set it up as active GTK theme (using kde-config-gtk-style) and it should solve most of the integration issues. The only glitch I found was setting GTK theme using kde-config-gtk-style creates ~/.gtkrc-2.0-kde which isn't picked up by anything until you create ~/.gtkrc-2.0 with the following:

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include "/home/your_user/.gtkrc-2.0-kde"

It's from the debian forums, but it's the sort of thing that's probably not specific to debian.





And re-reading your first post, you've mentioned "dark themes", I recall now having had problems with dark themes, albeit I don't quite recall how I've solved it. My guess was that I was using gtk-qt-engine and now I'm using qtcurve. But perhaps that was specific to me in which I use a "not dark" theme for my own user and a dark theme for the root user, so root GUI apps will "pop". What was happening was that some of these (mostly synaptic I guess) were like half-way dark, like "pieces" of my normal user color theme and "pieces" with the dark theme.

If I recall there's somewhere a issue about setting different colors for certain GTK themes, some themes would work only with a rigidly defined set of colors. I guess it was on gtk-qt-engine, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's also an intrinsic limitation of the oxygen-gtk theme, I think.

oxygen-gtk worked pretty well for me, when colors are changed in KDE settings, it pickes them up for GTK based programs on the fly (some like Firefox might need a restart). It doesn't support transparency however, so if you are using oyxgen-transparent in KDE, GTK programs will lack that.