Toolkit Beautification

From Gentoo Linux Wiki

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.

[edit] 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, (x11-themes/gtk-chtheme):

[edit] GTK+

Applications using the GTK+ toolkit take into account the options specifed in the ~/.gtkrc-2.0 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 x11-themes/gtk-engines. Some gtk-engines also come in more than one variety, so look in /usr/share/themes/ for availible themes. So start with adding to ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

gtk-theme-name="Clearlooks"

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

gtk-font-name="Bitstream Vera Sans 8"

The last entry, gtk-icon-theme-name, specifies what icon theme GTK+ applications will use. For example, the x11-themes/gnome-icon-theme. There are of course more availible in Portage. These install to /usr/share/icons/. Add one of these to your ~/.gtkrc-2.0,

gtk-icon-theme-name="gnome"

The resulting ~/.gtkrc-2.0 should look something like this,

gtk-theme-name="Clearlooks"
gtk-font-name="Bitstream Vera Sans 8"
gtk-icon-theme-name="gnome"

[edit] Qt3/KDE3

For changing the apparance of KDE applications without kde-base/kcontrol you will need to edit ~/.kde3/share/config/kdeglobals. 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,

[General]
XftAntialias=true
fixed=Monospace,8,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0
font=Bitstream Vera Sans,8,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0<
menuFont=Bitstream Vera Sans,8,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0
toolBarFont=Bitstream Vera Sans,8,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0

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

[Icons]
Theme=Tango