Toolkit Beautification

The purpose of this article is to explain how to have various toolkits -- GTK+, Qt, etc. -- look good without having to emerge the various control applications and settings daemons. Those of you running a lighter desktop and are aiming to have fewer packages emerged -- for example, Fluxbox, Firefox, Claws-Mail and ktorrent -- but without their toolkit "control centers" may have a use for this.

gtk+ 2.0 Change Theme
It's possible to change the GTK theme via a GUI without the need of Gnome with the gtk+ 2.0 Change Theme application, :

GTK+
Applications using the GTK+ toolkit take into account the options specifed in the file. The three entries, gtk-theme-name, gtk-font-name and gtk-icon-theme-name, decide what apparence GTK+ based application take.

The first one, gtk-theme-name, lets you specify the GTK+ theme, these are also known as gtk-engines. There are a plethora of these in Portage. The de-facto GTK+ theme, Clearlooks, is included in. Some gtk-engines also come in more than one variety, so look in for availible themes. So start with adding to :

The second entry, gtk-font-name, lets you specify the font and font size. The format is "Font Family Size", e.g.:

The last entry, gtk-icon-theme-name, specifies what icon theme GTK+ applications will use. For example, the. There are of course more availible in Portage. These install to. Add one of these to your ,

The resulting should look something like this,

GTK+ 3
To set the theme for GTK+ 3 applications, you can symlink to the theme's gtk-3.0 directory: ln -s /usr/share/themes/ /gtk-3.0 ~/.config/gtk-3.0 This is not suitable in all cases, as applications can store information in that directory. Another method is specifying the theme explicitly:

It is important to not enclose the properties in quotation marks. Otherwise your applications will start behaving funnily.

Also, make sure that the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable is set to point at your ~/.config directory. The settings.ini file will not be found if it is not.

echo $XDG_CONFIG_HOME

should return:

[your home directory]/.config

If it doesn't:

XDG_CONFIG_HOME="[your home directory]/.config" export XDG_CONFIG_HOME

Add these lines to .bashrc to make this permanent.

Qt3/KDE3
For changing the apparance of KDE applications without you will need to edit. There are a great many values to change here, so we will only cover the basics.

Font settings should go under the heading [General]. The four entries are fixed, font, menuFont, toolBarFont and the option XftAntialias. An example using Bitstream Vera Sans size 8 across the board, fixed set to Monospace size 8 and antialias enabled would be,

What icon theme to use is specified under the [Icons] heading followd by a Theme entry,

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