Cannot add new themes on .themes XFCE

I am a new manjaro user and would like to add new themes since the choice provided is very old-fashioned. I downloaded a few, created a .themes folder and pasted them into it and they do no appear under “appearance”. they are still in my created .themes folder .
what can I do to add new themes to manjaro xfce? remember I am not very experienced.
i tried to paste them using Thunar, but it was impossible to paste

Thank You very much!!

…from the repos, or xfce-look.org ? the latter have to be extracted first.

two ways:

  • per user: ~/.local/share/themes/ (not .themes)
  • systemwide:# /usr/share/themes/

Yes . From there

Let me try. I will let you know. Thank You

I created the themes folder and tried to paste a folder into it with thunar but it does not work…It doesn´t appear on apperances… What can I do?ß it seems to be blocked…

What you download from there are compressed archives - usually .tar.gz
You can’t use those as they are.
First unpack them, then copy the unpacked contents
the whole folder structure contained in those archives
to where it needs to be
… be that ~/.themes or ~/.local/share/themes
I do think the ~/.themes folder should work - but you can just try the other location and see whether it makes a difference.

There are Xfce4/Xfwm4 themes as well as GTK3/GTK4 themes -
not all of them might work with a recent XFCE desktop because they might by now be incompatible because some of them might be just too old.

Please be more precise. What exact theme (link)?
You opened thunar, activated “show hidden files” and created a foder “themes” (without quotes) in .local/share/ ? Is it exactly this what you have done? Or something else?
We need your precise information.

I did activate show hidden files in thunar. I created a folder themes without quotes and unpacked the downloaded files before pasting them… even taking all of these into account they do not show under “appearances”
the theme was: Bazik_Dark_Blue.tar.gz

the folder was also created in .local/share/

This theme is only a xfwm4 theme.It appears in your window manager and is decoration for your applications.

mmh I do not quite understand you… an xfwm4 theme is not suitable? what kind of theme should I choose? a gt3/gt4? I now don’t know what would be suitable for my environment

I just downloaded it
from here:

BaZik - Eyecandy for your XFCE-Desktop - xfce-look.org

put it in ~/.themes
extracted it there
and it is working as intended - selectable via
xfce4-settings-manager → Window Manager → the “Style” tab

It only affects the appearance of window decorations.
None of the menu selectors are changed to being blue - this is (for me) probably overridden by a more complete GTK theme I have set (Numix)

…it is suitable, but it is only window decoration, not a complete theme. Look here or here for a complete gtk3/gtk4 theme.

Thank you… I am looking for a more complete GTK Theme let me see

where can I find Numix?

yay -Ss Numix | grep Installiert
aur/numix-cursor-theme 1.2-1 (+5 0.00) (Installiert)
aur/numix-square-icon-theme 22.05.22-1 (+14 0.14) (Installiert)
aur/numix-gtk-theme 2.6.7-1 (+19 0.53) (Installiert)
aur/numix-icon-theme-git 21.10.31.r0.g7a28092dd-1 (+427 0.34) (Installiert)

these are the AUR packages that I have installed

Thank you for telling me about Numix. Now I am able to see the themes on “appearances”". Thank You very Much!!!

One more question regarding themes, ( this seems impossible here, it was possible on manjaro KDE-----) is there a theme which can make it possible to move the control panel to top?

If you want to install a new theme, just click Add button in Appearence. Theme will be striped from non XFCE stuff like gnome shell, plank theme etc, and pasted to ~/.theme directory. The directory have some disadvantage (but it’s good for testing themes), because apps like Timeshift or Tor Browser will have default theme, so better way is to paste theme to /usr/share/themes (didn’t try with ./local/share).


If you use apps from gnome written in GTK4 you can link assets, gtk.css and gtk-dark.css from gtk-4.0 in theme folder to ~/.config/gtk-4.0. So GTK3 and GTK4 apps will look the same.

gtk4


As guys pointed above, you need to apply new theme in Window Manager if downloaded theme have xfwm4 folder.

Most themes on Pling in GTK3/4 have also themes for xfwm4, so you don’t need to restrict yourself to xfce-look.

1 Like

You can move panel manually, just right-click on panel, go to Panel > Panel Preferences… and in Display tab uncheck Lock Panel. Then move it wherever you want.