frosch03.de/posts/2017-06-30-gtk3_theme

Motivation

Most of the programs with a graphical interface out there come with a light theme by default. Unfortunately I'm the kind of user that likes their screen more dimmed. On mobile devices one is often lucky and there is a dark theme waiting to be used. And also on my machine running Arch Linux I managed for most tools to come with a dimmed ui.

I do use pulseaudio as audio deamon and therefore pavucontrol to manage the volume of the various audio streams. Now pavucontrol uses GTK3 to draw their ui. To get pavucontrol with a darker ui one must look for GTK3 themes.

Luckily there are themes. The one that fits my needs is Arc Theme which comes with the nice `Arc-Dark` theme. And as always, this very theme is already available with AUR.

Installing

The following describes the steps to be taken, to change the theme to `Arc-Dark`.

Arc-Dark Theme

Download the latest snapshot into your tmp folder and extract the tarball.

{% highlight bash %} cd /tmp wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/gtk-theme-arc-git.tar.gz tar xzvf gtk-theme-arc-git.tar.gz cd gtk-theme-arc-git {% endhighlight %}

Build the pacman package and install it

{% highlight bash %} makepkg -s sudo pacman -U gtk-theme-arc-git-663.8290cb8-1-any.pkg.tar.xz {% endhighlight %}

For Changing GTK2 Themes

The tool gtk-chtheme can be used, to change themes for GTK2 applications. I first had the impression that pavucontrol was using GTK2. This is actual wrong, it is using GTK3. Anyhow it might be a good idea to change the theme for both. gtk-chtheme is available within standard arch repositories.

{% highlight bash %} sudo pacman -Suy gtk-chtheme {% endhighlight %}

For Changing GTK3 Themes

The tool lxappearance is able to change GTK3 themes and it is also available via standard arch repositories.

{% highlight bash %} sudo pacman -Suy lxappearance {% endhighlight %}

Changing the Theme

Themes are actually changed pretty straight forward. Within gtk-chtheme one is presented with a window where one can choose the theme from.

gtk-chtheme.png

Figure 1: img

And also lxappearance is asking on the main screen for the theme to choose.

lxappearance.png

Figure 2: img

More themes

So this theme fits my needs perfectly. If you prefer different themes you might want to check out solar-theme. And there are many more.