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by nickjj 54 days ago
I do like CLI tools and TUIs but in the article it mentions Gnome style apps don't fit the look. That sounds like a limitation of Omarchy.

It's not too bad to theme GTK apps and have them all look a consistent way. For example I use Tokyonight Moon and Gruvbox and they both have GTK themes that look great for Firefox, Thunar, GIMP, LibreOffice and more. I don't use Omarchy but here's a few screenshots https://x.com/nickjanetakis/status/2037125261657883061/photo....

Nothing fancy was done on my end, just installed the specific GTK themes. They even support live reloading because GTK's tooling supports it, my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles handle all of it for you. I still prefer TUIs but you can have nice looking GUI apps for when you want them.

1 comments

Those apps you mentioned are not your typical modern GTK4/libadwaita apps, so naturally you can theme them. It's the GTK4 apps - and ones which use libadwaita specifically - that cause grief.

- Firefox: Uses its own custom rendering engine but interfaces with GTK3. It respects standard GTK3 themes.

- Thunar: Uses GTK3

- GIMP: Since v3.0, they now use GTK3

- LibreOffice: Uses its own visual framework (VCL) but has a GTK3 plugin to draw its window frame and menus, and it also respects the system theme.

None of these use libadwaita, let alone GTK4, so they're not good examples unfortunately.

> so they're not good examples unfortunately

They're some of the most popular GTK apps available. They seems like a good example to me.

The themes I'm using are compatible with GTK4 apps too.

I use niri which suggests installing xdg-desktop-portal-gnome which comes with Nautilus which is a GTK4 app. It's perfectly themed just like the GTK3 apps.