Revision as of 14:14, 21 November 2014

This wiki page is about theming your LXQt installation.

Window Title Bar Theming

The window title bars are drawn onto your screen by the window manager you use. The default window manager of LXQt is Openbox.

The Openbox configuration tool can be opened: Start Menu --> Settings --> Openbox Settings

If you lack the Openbox configuration tool, please install it:

sudo pacman -S obconf

Please choose your preferred window title bar theme from there. Additional theme can be downloaded. An attractive dark theme is:

yaourt -S mediterraneannight-theme

Alternatively, follow this guide to install a more modern window manager with higher hardware resources: LXQt with kwin

Window Content Theming

This section is about theming the content of you windows. Especially the background and font colors, but also the form of menus and buttons.

If you’d like to have a unified theme for all your GTK2/3/Openbox and Qt4/5 applications and be able to customise them:

1.

Choose GTK+ in lxqt-config (LXQt Configuration Center --> LXQt Appearance)

2.

Install the LXDE theme switcher:

sudo pacman -S lxappearance

Open it by clicking on: Start Menu --> Settings --> Appearance.

Unfortunately, this functionality is not implemented in LXQt yet.

3.

Install well maintained themes supporting GTK2/3 and Openbox

An attractive e.g. dark theme is

yaourt -S vertex-themes

4.

Edit manually the theme files to further customise if you like.

For a pure Qt4/5 system you don’t have really an option to choose a preset or customise the default one. You may use the default fusion and wait either for qtcurve or for vitality (bespin developer’s new creation) to have a config tool. Or another generous soul may create a qtconfig-qt5 in the mean time.

Panel Theming

Panel theming is available via the LXQt Configuration Center --> LXQt Appearance --> LXQt Theme

Additionally there are more themes available for download in the Manjaro LXQt subforum. All Theme folders need to be unpacked into the following directory:

/usr/share/lxqt/themes/

Attention: Some themes do not fully work. Please read the comments about the recommended usage.

Example:

Please look at this Chrome theme.

The downloaded folder needs to be unpacked and moved into the right location mentioned above. The final path to the "chrome" folder has to be

/usr/share/lxqt/themes/chrome/

Change Icons of Applications and System Settings

The path of icons is saven in .desktop files. For each application you can find their corresponding .desktop files in one of these locations:

/usr/share/applications/
~/.local/share/applications/

Note that all folder names beginning with a dot are hidden folders. You need to make them visible by clicking View --> Show Hidden in your PcManFM-Qt File Browser. The ~ directory is your home folder.

Open a .desktop file with a text editor with root privileges and look for the following line:

Icon=

Insert the path to the icon you want to use after the = symbol. A lot of system icons can be found in this location:

/usr/share/icons/

Example: if you want to use a flag icon, use this line in the .desktop file:

Icon=/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/apps/locale.png

Change Order of Icons on Panel

You can click the right mouse button on top of a panel element in order to move it. Alternatively, you can move panel elements by holding CTRL+Left Mouse and draging the element. If you want to do it manually by editing files, do the following:

You can modify the panel by opening the following file in a text editor:

~/.config/lxqt/panel.conf

Note that all folder names beginning with a dot are hidden folders. You need to make them visible by clicking View --> Show Hidden in your PcManFM-Qt File Browser. The ~ directory is your home folder.

Change the order of whole paragraphs beginning with [square brackets] to move items on your panel. In addition, use one of the following lines:

alignment=Left
alignment=Right

Pay attention to the paragraph with the title [quicklaunch]. This is a panel element, which contains multiple quick launch items. it can only be moved as one element. The order of every quick launch item can be adjusted separately within the [quicklaunch] element.

In order to see the changes logout and log in again. If you want to see the changes immediately run the following commands:

killall lxqt-panel
lxqt-panel

Change Icon of Start Menu / Mainmenu

This Icon can be changed by opening the following folder with root privileges:

/usr/share/lxqt/themes/<theme name>/

Replace <theme name> with the name of the theme you are currently using. The name of your current theme can be found in System Settings>LXQT Configuration Center>LXQtAppearance>LXQt Theme. The Start Menu icon will only get changed for <theme name>. All other themes still use the default icon!

In this folder, you find a mainmenu.png file. It is the icon of your Start Menu (called "Mainmenu" in LXQt). Replace this file with the icon file you want to use. Rename your icon file to the same name.

Great icons can be found in this thread: https://forum.manjaro.org/index.php?topic=15613.0