GTK and QT Themes - Fluxbox Slackware12
 

Hi !

I'm trying to make my Fluxbox manager look a bit nicer than the default (?) grey GTK and/or (?) QT themes.

So I downloaded a GTK theme and installed gtk-chtheme. The program does not give me any errors.

However, the only application affected by the theme-change is firefox. I have compiled from source krusader, amaroK, Ktouch, Kile and Kate on my box, and none of them are affected by the theme-change done by this program.

Then I started editing my ~/.gtkrc file manually. I have found the following things:

- the only file actually being read is ~/.gtkrc-2.0, and not ~/.gtkrc
- when I specify to load a gtk theme, and not a gtk-2.0 theme in this file, nothing happens
- as before, when some GTK2 theme is loaded, only firefox changes.

My ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file now looks like this, and it succesfully loads the Phacile-green theme.... only for firefox ;]

So, this would suggest that I don't have GTK1 installed ... ? But I do have it.. In fact, the following are installed on my box:

gtk+-1.2.10-i486-4.tgz
gtk+2-2.10.13-i486-1.tgz
gtk-engines-2.2.0.tar.bz2
gtk1-engines-0.12-i486-2x.tgz
gtk-qt-engine-0.7-i486-2gtx.tgz
qt-3.3.8-i486-5_slack12.0.tgz
qt-x11-free=3.3.8.tar.bz2

Okay, now the QT part... I have actually no idea which program uses GTK and which uses QT, I suppose all the KDE apps should use GTK, but Kile, amaroK and Ktouch are not affected at all when I load a GTK2 theme in ~/.gtkrc-2.0.

When I set some settings in qtconfig, none of them apply to any program (amaroK, Kile, etc etc). When I choose to load QtCurves as my GTK theme (which takes the QT settings for GTK programs), firefox indeed uses the settings which I set with qtconfig, but again, no other program does...

Then I installed gtk-qt-engine, but this didn't change anything..

Any ideas ? ;] is it even possible to change the appearance of say, amaroK, on Fluxbox running on Slackware?

You've got it backwards... KDE apps (and KDE itself) use Qt. And those gtk-qt-engine type packages are for applying Qt themes to GTK2 apps, not the other way around.

QT and GTK themes affect only the applications that run within the window manager. If you want to change the window manager theme, you must look for a fluxbox-specific theme.

You can find many here:
http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/962/

Thanks for the replies. I'm not looking for a fluxbox theme, which changes only the titlebar etc, but for a theme which changes the colors of the applications inside the windowmanager windows.

hollywoodb: from that it follows that firefox is a GTK app, which makes sense since I am able to change its theme... And amaroK and Kile are Qt apps.. So it seems something is wrong with my qtconfig?

Yes, firefox is gtk, amarok, kile - qt apps

I fixed it by installing KDE, changing the colors there, and going back to fluxbox.

It sucks though to have KDE installed just to change some settings ;/

You can mostly do this by hand, even though it might be a little bit annoying to poke around in all config files. But all in all those GUI configuration tools just write into textfiles which can be edited.

(I just got rid of the necessity of gconfd and family to load a specific icon theme for some gtk apps..:)

gtk-theme-switch: http://www.muhri.net/nav.php3?node=gts

It's a bit out-dated, but I still use it on fluxbox to this day.

I don't know of an equivalent for Qt :\