Arch Linux

BlueRave

Member

Registered: 2017-08-09

Posts: 4

[SOLVED] Why my apps are using GTK2 instead of GTK3 ?

Hello everyone,

Noob question here
I'm setting up arch for the first time and I've been surprised to see my GTK-3 settings ignored by the few apps I've already installed (mainly firefox and thunar). It appears those apps are using GTK-2 (so a GTK2 conf file did the trick). But why ? I thought it would have worked over GTK-3 ? Maybe I did it wrong.
BTW, I'm using awesome windows manager, no gnome or any other desktop env installed.

Thanks

Last edited by BlueRave (2017-09-05 09:05:47)

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: [SOLVED] Why my apps are using GTK2 instead of GTK3 ?

Some applications were started when there was only gtk2 (also legacy gtk1) and no gtk3, and they simply haven't been ported to use the newer version of the toolkit. I believe both thunar and firefox have plans to abandon gtk2, but aren't there yet, due to lack of developers or focus on other features.

gtk2 is still maintained, and works just fine, apart from the hassle of having to configure two toolkits separately.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,657

Re: [SOLVED] Why my apps are using GTK2 instead of GTK3 ?

Firefox has been ported to GTK3, but doesn't use GTK3 "directly" so maybe it reads its info from somewhere else, would be weird though. Thunar is definitely still gtk2

Are you sure you setup your gtk3 conf correctly? What does it look like, where did you add it? Have you seen https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GT … figuration ?

Last edited by V1del (2017-08-11 12:59:52)

BlueRave

Member

Registered: 2017-08-09

Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] Why my apps are using GTK2 instead of GTK3 ?

Thanks for all the information. Yup, I've seen it and did the following :

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gtk-3.0/settings.ini

[Settings]
gtk-icon-theme-name = "Numix"
gtk-theme-name = "Numix"
gtk-font-name = "DejaVu Sans 11"

with XDG_CONFIG_HOME defined in /etc/profile

export XDG_CONFIG_HOME="$HOME/.config"

Last edited by BlueRave (2017-08-11 19:30:24)

Chazza

Wiki Maintainer

Registered: 2013-06-02

Posts: 506

Re: [SOLVED] Why my apps are using GTK2 instead of GTK3 ?

Ah, for settings.ini you shouldn't quote the theme name and other settings. Leave them unquoted.

Shameless self promotion here but I wrote a little python Tk app a while back that can write a few GTK+ settings to ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini. If you want to use it, it can be found here: https://github.com/charlesbos/my-script … tktheme.py