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Appearance

The Appearance page

One place to pick the GTK theme, icon theme, cursor (theme and size), interface font (antialiasing, hinting, subpixel order), the dark preference, and sounds and effects: event sounds (the alert/error "bell" sounds apps play), click and key feedback sounds, and animations (the fades and slides in menus, popovers, switches and tabs). Choices preview inside XControl; Apply writes them everywhere an X11 program looks. The Theme tab has the style, icons, cursor and Qt; Fonts & Effects has the rest. Apply and Revert sit under both:

  • ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini, ~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini and ~/.gtkrc-2.0 (other settings in those files are kept)
  • ~/.icons/default/index.theme and Xcursor.*/Xft.* in ~/.Xresources (merged with xrdb) for the cursor and fonts of plain X programs; the root window cursor is set too
  • GNOME's org.gnome.desktop.interface (including color-scheme, which libadwaita apps follow), Xfce's xfconf when present, and qt5ct/qt6ct when installed
  • the XSETTINGS manager, which is what makes open apps change without a restart. On X, GTK apps read settings.ini only when they start, and ignore it altogether while an XSETTINGS manager runs. That is the usual reason a theme tool "doesn't apply": a leftover xsettingsd keeps announcing the old theme. XControl updates xsettingsd's config and reloads it, or starts it (and adds it to your login) if none is running. With GNOME, MATE or Xfce's own settings daemon, it goes through those instead.

GTK 4.20 and later choose a theme's dark variant only from gtk-interface-color-scheme, which on X11 comes from nothing but ~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini (there's no XSETTINGS key for it, and the old gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme there no longer counts). XControl writes it when that GTK 4 is installed; GTK 4 apps pick up a light/dark change when they restart.

Sounds and animations go through the same places (gtk-enable-event-sounds, gtk-enable-input-feedback-sounds, gtk-enable-animations; Net/EnableEventSounds, Net/EnableInputFeedbackSounds, Gtk/EnableAnimations over XSETTINGS; GNOME's enable-animations, event-sounds and input-feedback-sounds), so open apps follow right away. Windows fading as they open and close is picom's, on the Bar & Compositor page.

On i3 and similar window managers, restart the window manager (i3: Mod+Shift+R) to get the new cursor on the desktop and window borders.

An app ignores the theme?

Check an app… lets you click the app's window and inspects that process: the toolkit it really loads, how it's packaged, its environment and the user it runs as. Usual causes:

  • GTK_THEME set in its environment (overrides everything)
  • an AppImage whose bundled GTK doesn't search /usr/share/themes: one click links the theme into ~/.local/share/themes, where every GTK looks
  • Flatpak: copies the theme to your home folder and grants Flatpak apps read access
  • libadwaita apps: they only follow the dark preference, by design
  • the theme has no version for the app's GTK (e.g. a GTK 3 theme and a GTK 4 app)
  • Qt apps without QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct (or qt6ct) in the session environment
  • a leftover ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css (or gtk-3.0/gtk.css): GTK loads it on top of every theme. Theme installers with a "libadwaita"/"GTK 4" option and style editors leave one behind; one click renames it (and the assets link next to it) so nothing is lost
  • the app runs as another user (sudo), or draws its own interface