How to apply desktop theme to VLC, Virtualbox etc.?

Hi there,

Is there a way I can theme VLC player and Virtualbox according to the theme I use (I know I can skin VLC)?
At the moment I use the beautiful Shades-of-grey theme (GitHub - WernerFP/Shades-of-gray-theme: [unmaintained] A flat dark GTK-theme with ergonomic contrasts) on my XFCE but in both applications it is hardly impossible to read the pulldown menues (see screenshots).

For testing purposes I installed an vanilla Manjaro XFCE and changed the theme colors from Manjaro green to Matcha azul and even there VLC doesn’t work as expected.

Unfortunately I can’t share neither pictures nor links so I don’t know how to add my screenshots :confused:

Thank you in advance
fahrer17

Welcome to the forum! :slight_smile:

VLC and VirtualBox are Qt-based applications, while XFCE is based upon the GTK widget toolkit.

Make sure that you have qt5ct and kvantum-qt5 installed ─ they’re both in the main repository if they’re not on your system already ─and then you can tweak the look & feel of Qt-based applications.

kvantum-qt5 ─ listed in your menu as Kvantum Manager ─ is a theme engine based upon scalable vector graphics, in which you can load special Kvantum themes. There are several such themes in the repository, such as kvantum-matcha, and others can be downloaded from store.kde.org.

Hope this helps. :wink:

3 Likes

Blockquote
Welcome to the forum!

Thank you :slightly_smiling_face:
I actually wanted to write that myself but was already so tired and annoyed by my problem that I forgot to do it.

Blockquote
VLC and VirtualBox are Qt-based applications, while XFCE is based upon the GTK widget toolkit.

Ah, I see, this makes things a lot clearer!

Blockquote
Make sure that you have qt5ct and kvantum-qt5 installed ─ they’re both in the main repository if they’re not on your system already ─and then you can tweak the look & feel of Qt-based applications.
kvantum-qt5 ─ listed in your menu as Kvantum Manager ─ is a theme engine based upon scalable vector graphics, in which you can load special Kvantum themes. There are several such themes in the repository, such as kvantum-matcha , and others can be downloaded from store.kdeorg.

Alright, coming from Xubuntu originally I wasn’t really aware of what I can do with Kvantum, so I watched two or three tutorials. Though my theme did not show up in Kvantum I somehow managed to apply it to all the programs I tested so far.

So thank you for your useful hint!

Oh, one more question since I couldn’t answer it so far: Is it advisable to use KDE Kvantum themes with XFCE?

Well, Kvantum themes only work with Qt-based applications, so they have no effect on XFCE itself. But if a Kvantum theme helps better integrating the look & feel of Qt-based apps in the XFCE environment, then I don’t see why you wouldn’t use them. :wink:

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