TIP Change Appearance of GTK Applications

From Gentoo Linux Wiki

[edit] Introduction

The GIMP Toolkit (abbreviated GTK+) is a popular widget toolkit for the X Windows System for creating graphical user interfaces. GTK+ makes use of themes, which effects the appearances of different widgets and key bindings in applications which use GTK+. System wide GTK+ themes that anyone on the machine can use are located in /usr/share/themes. Each user can also have additional GTK+ themes which are located in ~/.themes.

[edit] How to Change GTK+ Themes without GNOME

The easiest method is to emerge gtk-chtheme or emerge gtk-theme-switch. After one of these programs are installed you can run them with gtk-chtheme and switch2 respectively and pick the theme you want to use and apply the change.

[edit] By Hand Alternative

Alternatively you can change which GTK+ theme to use by hand. Open ~/.gtkrc-2.0 in a text editor and change the paths of the theme files to include.

include "/usr/share/themes/Industrial/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

To make finding installed themes easier you can copy and paste the gtkthemes script into some text editor.

1. Save in /usr/local/bin as gtkthemes
2. Next make gtkthemes executable by typing chmod +x /usr/local/bin/gtkthemes
3. Finally run gtkthemes to see what themes you can use.

#!/bin/bash

THEMEDIR="/usr/share/themes"

if [[ $# -lt 1 ]]; then
  GLB="`find $THEMEDIR -regex '.+?/gtk\(-[0-9.]+\)?/gtkrc' -printf '%P ' | sed 's,\([^/]\+\)/\S*,\1,g'`"
  USR="`find ~/.themes -regex '.+?/gtk\(-[0-9.]+\)?/gtkrc' -printf '%P ' | sed 's,\([^/]\+\)/\S*,\1,g'`"

  if [[ -z $GLB && -z $USR ]]; then
    echo "No GTK+ themes are installed on this machine."
    exit 1
  else
    if [[ -n $GLB ]]; then echo -e "GTK+ Themes anyone can use:\n" $GLB; fi
    if [[ -n $GLB && -n $USR ]]; then echo " "; fi
    if [[ -n $USR ]]; then echo -e "GTK+ Themes $USER can use:\n" $USR; fi
    exit 0
  fi
else
  GTKFILES=""
  if [[ -d "~/.themes/$1" ]]; then GTKFILES="`find ~/.themes/$1 -name 'gtkrc'`"; fi
  if [[ -d "$THEMEDIR/$1" ]]; then GTKFILES="`find $THEMEDIR/$1 -name 'gtkrc'`"; fi
  
  if [[ -n $GTKFILES ]]; then
    echo "Put these paths into your .gtkrc-2.0 file:"
    echo $GTKFILES
  else
    echo "No GTK theme named '$1'"
  fi
fi