The info on the possible issue mentions that there can be an issue with GTK4 apps not following the system dark theme anymore. I personally didn’t have this issue and didn’t have to use the measures advised, probably because I use Adwaita-dark.
However, what is not mentioned is that GTK2 apps may stop following the dark theme. In my case I noticed it on Rainlendar. Granted, not the most widely-used app, but other GTK2 apps are affected as well. Again, there may not be a lot of them still around, but it affects, for example, HexChat, which, if I’m not mistaken, is shipped with every Manjaro fresh install.
Mod edit: Your posts have been moved to a dedicated topic.
This week 2.16.2 has been released. It contains some small fixes and features that have accumulated over the past two years since the last release.
This will be the last release I make of HexChat. The project has largely been unmaintained for years now and nobody else stepped up to do that work.
I want to say thank you to all of the contributors, users, and chatters I’ve interacted with over the years. HexChat was a very important and formative project for me; I started contributing to it as a teenager, learned so much, met many great people, and it led to greater things in my life. It is hard to let go but the time has come for me to move on.
I am going to move all data that I can to be hosted on Github, so all documentation, installers, and dependencies will be there until the end of Microsoft.
Forks of the project are welcomed. Nobody can stop the code from living on.
AUR package rainlandar-lite has 3 skins in folder /opt/rainlendar2/skins/ Chromophore.r2skinSavannah.r2skinShadow4.r2skin
Rainlender FAQ - How can I create new skins?
You can find skin format documentation from the Rainlendar’s help file. It also contains a step by step tutorial for making a simple xml-format skin.
One possibility is to look at one of the existing Rainlendar skins and see how it’s made. Rainlendar2 skin (.r2skin) is just a normal zip archive with different file extension so you can uncompress it after renaming the extension back to .zip. The archive contains few xml files and the resources (images, scripts, …). The skin.xml file must be in the root of the archive so make sure that when you are zipping the archive after modifications that it doesn’t contain any extra folders.
Rainlendar skins do not affect its standard GUI elements, like the color of the window “background” (against which the text is displayed), text color, and so on. They affect only the specific Rainlendar widgets (they are displayed in a kind of an “additional layer” of your desktop surface; think Conky to visualize what I mean). The themes affect only visual effects of these widgets. But when you need to open an event or task (to add a new one or edit an existing one) — this is done through standard GUI windows and those are rendered with the standard window background, which after the last update became light. Also the context menu (the one that is displayed when you right-click the Rainlendar tray item) is also rendered in standard GUI theme colors, so it also used to be dark, but became light, and is equally unaffected by Rainlendar skins.
Yes, I understand how it works.
I also understand that one can be lucky and find a skin that disguises things to a degree.
With respect the underlying controls, I’m afraid there’s little to be done about that with GTK2 being removed. Perhaps it’s time to start petitioning the developer to update – though, he’s a one-man-operation, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Okay, thanks for the advice. I doubt that he will fix it, since he did not yet move from GTK2, so I was hoping there was a way to adjust something on the user side.
