Xfce themes with gtk3

[engineermdr]

Hi everyone.

I've been avoiding gtk3 up until now because it never looked right to me. But with switching to gtk3 becoming inevitable, I decided to build a virtual machine to play with themes. I followed the Xfce wiki page https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Xfce and made sure I had x11-themes/gtk-engines-xfce-3.2.0-r300 installed, but the Xfce themes look very messed up in gtk3 apps (spacing is non-existent, scrollbars disappear). I tryed keywording Xfce and gtk-engines-xfce to get the latest, but still the same. Has anyone managed to get gtk3 apps looking the same as gtk2 apps with Xfce themes?

Yea, I know there's Adwaita, but I find the scroll bars too skinny for my tastes. And there's others, none which I have found I liked. TraditionalOk from mate-themes is sort of acceptable, but gtk3 and gtk2 scrollbars look quite different to my eye. I was hoping to try the Xfce themes as see how they look, as I found Xfce Evolution theme from https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1191436/ quite uniform.

[saderror256]

i dont even think mate themes have ever looked good with gtk3

Honestly the best choice is to avoid gtk3 in general unless its your own choice, i find things just work better with gtk2 still

But apart from that, gtk3 is up to date and may you want to stick with it, so try a more popular theme.. like arc, iirc they work fine on gtk3
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[engineermdr]

I'm with you, I want to stay gtk2 as long as possible. My local repo is ever growing and I fear the day some conflict occurs I can't resolve (I'm already struggling with needing guile-1.8 and 2.0) or some upgrade is needed (Firefox some day) so I just wanted to take another look at gtk3 before it's upon me.

I discovered a different version of clearlooks-phenix (7.0.1) from xfce-look.org than the one in portage and it actually looks pretty good. I really like Clearlooks and I'm pretty happy so far, just need to try it for a while an see if there's any weirdness. The one in portage is 3.0.15 and is very old and meant for gtk+-3.6. But now I see 7.0.1 is in portage but keyword masked. It would appear gtk3 needs a different theme implementation for each version and too bad they are not in sync in stable.

[Leio]

gtk3 theming is done via CSS and declared stable since 3.20. We only have newer versions, so no need to bother with the old unstable theming API.
It's unfortunate that many theme writers ran away before that API was finally made stable with 3.20, due to things potentially breaking each version before that, because well, it was unstable.
My suggestion would be to find a good theme for modern gtk3 and stop using gtk2, so one doesn't need to find a matching gtk2 theme. But I'm obviously biased.
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