30 Jun 2017

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.

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

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.