Need Help with GTK Theme ScrollBar Steppers
 

I have recently installed Fedora 25 XFCE (I had been using Fedora 24). After launching libreoffice calc, I noticed that the scroll bars didn't have the arrows at each end for fine tuning. Apparently, the default Adwaita theme does not supply them. Fedora 24 had the same problem, but then I was able to find a theme (BlueMenta) which supplied the missing arrows and looked fine.

This time, I searched through the Fedora 25 installed themes and found two which appeared to enable the arrows: Albatross and Xfce-xde2. Switching to either of those themes restored the arrows, but I found both of them unsatisfactory (the scroll bars and/or the arrows were almost invisible). Moreover, neither of these restored the arrows to my terminal windows.

Searching the web, I found a suggestion that worked for some users: install a file named gtk.css in the folder ~/.config/gtk-3.0 with the contents:
This file has no effect on anything, as far as I can tell.

My normal response to this type of thing would be to look at an almost suitable theme and try to tweak it to something more to my needs. The only theme that comes close is the default Adwaita. However, the file /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-3.0/gtk.css merely says that this file is not used because Adwaita is built into the system.

Why can't I override the Adwaita defaults with ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css ?

Why don't the Albatross and Xfce-kde2 themes have arrows on the terminal windows, since they have them on the calc windows?

Any suggestions?

I gave up on that kind of stuff a long time ago for this same reason, My suggestion would be start from scratch or a shell of a theme and create your own custom theme with everything you want, then use that one, and save it, up load it even so "they" can save it for you on there server somewhere, then you can always get to it.

I have a similar problem with the gnome-terminal in ark with the Adwita theme.
Hence I got the deepin theme and there I enabled the stepper in
/usr/share/themes/deepin/gtk-2.0/main.rc setting

GtkScrollbar::has-backward-stepper = 1
GtkScrollbar::has-forward-stepper = 1

and
/usr/share/themes/deepin/gtk-3.0/gtk.css


-GtkScrollbar-has-backward-stepper: true;
-GtkScrollbar-has-forward-stepper: true;

dwaltz, thanks for posting but you're offering a GTK2 solution for a GTK3 problem.
sorry to say, but it is useless in this context.
also the question is somewhat outdated, i doubt it is still valid with all the changes gnome/gtk3 went through in the past 2 years.