On Mon, 18 Jan 2021 09:01:54 -0800 William Morder via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org wrote:
I did try to accomplish this by going through the Trinity Control Center / Appearance / Colors, but nothing happens to my non-TDE apps, so far as I can tell. (Actually, I am only guessing, from what I remember; my TCC screen has been frozen now for a couple hours. See attachment.)
Some of my apps refuse to change colors, even though they used to behave like I want (in Jessie, that is, before I upgraded to Devuan Beowulf). I seem to recall that E.Liddell, or maybe Nik, offered some css tricks to do something like this? The main thing is that I don't want to look at a white screen, but I prefer to keep my own color scheme, not to use one of those ready-made themes.
Non-TDE applications will mostly be using one of three widget toolkits: GTK2, GTK3, or QT5.
The easiest way I've found to theme QT5 is to use qt5ct. Your distro may have it packaged, or get it from https://sourceforge.net/projects/qt5ct/ .
GTK2 and GTK3 can be themed by using gtk-qt-engine and/or gtk3-qt-engine , which are optional TDE packages. They're known to cause problems with some systems, though. Try gtk3-qt-engine first.
The other option for theming GTK2 and GTK3 is to edit some text files. The theme file for GTK2 is .gtkrc-2.0, in the user's home directory, and it uses a proprietary format. GTK3 uses one or more CSS files located in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/ . Unfortunately, figuring out exactly what to do with these files is like pulling hen's teeth, or at least I was never able to find any documentation with the list of GTK widget names on it. I had to hunt through a bunch of downloaded styles to get things sort-of working, and GTK3 is, in addition, a moving target to some extent.
I have my own hand-edited GTK2 and GTK3 theming files (set up for white text on black/dark blue) that I can offer as examples if you need them, although both styles are slightly flawed.
E. Liddell