Change color or theme of specific window

Is it possible to start a program and instructing it to use a different theme or color scheme than I have active?

I use AbiWord (a gnome program, I’m sorry KDE), I love the lightweight of it. It acts as a text editor but I can still format the text to bold, cursive etc.

Using darkmode with this program is, not ideal, but in light mode it’s perfect.

Is there a way to launch the program, or edit some config file so this specific program runs with other colors?
The only thing I find in Special Applications Settings is to change the color of the title bar, and that is not enough for this, the icons are VERY dark and hard to see in darkmode.

Thanks in advance!

You can run it as Exec=env GTK_THEME=(whatever gtk theme you’d like) abiword.
The theme has to be in ~/.themes.
As an example, Brave using a dark theme whereas Kazam ( gtk app) uses the regular light color setting.

I was a bit unclear, I should obviously have stated that I use manjaro, kde Plasma. I dont have any gtk themes installed or even run gtk, only the program is gtk based.

So is there a way to do this but with kde theme? I only have the original installed as of now in /usr/share/plasma

Can I just create a copy of a theme and place it in ~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme/ (or should it be in ~/.themes) and change the GTK_THEME in your above description to KDE_THEME?

Abiword changes color if I change MY theme, so I know it’s following the kde plasma theme.

I’m very new to linux desktop env so forgive me for noob questions.

Edit. I still use x11 since I am on nvidia, wayland still has too many small bugs for me to use, if that makes any difference.

You will have at least one gtk theme installed, and probably both of Breeze (the default KDE theme) and Breath (Manjaro’s tweak of the Breeze theme). The packages are breeze-gtk and gtk-theme-breath. You can select which one applies for gtk programs in System Settings > Appearance > Application Style > Configure GNOME/GTK Applications Style…

2 Likes

If you run a GTK application you need to use a GTK theme. By default Plasma uses a GTK theme that looks like a plasma theme so you don’t notice it.

€: to slow :smiley:

2 Likes

Aawwww, oswald_c beat you with a few seconds!

But yes!!! This is it!

THANK YOU!! <3

To clearify, this changes the themes of ALL gtk applications right?
So If I want to ONLY apply it on f ex abiword the sollution would be to run it as Exec=env GTK_THEME=Default abiword (if I want to use the default gtk theme)?

Edit. It looks really great! <3


The only thing I can’t seem to fix is the cursor color, but I can live with that.

Edit2. Yepp, can start with either Exec=env GTK_THEME=Default abiword or:

2 Likes