Gtk+ theme changes not… changing… in SuSE

Friday August 26, 2005 by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper | 7 Comments

This one threw me for a loop.

I found a nice new program to change Gtk+ themes. It seems cleaner, nicer, and more finished-er than muhri’s gtk-theme-switch programs. And it does previews nicely, etc., and the only thing that it didn’t seem to do well was actually activate the theme that I wanted to use–which was, after all, the entire point of using said program.

What I found was that SuSE has done something to change gtk programs and where said gtk programs actually look for for their style configuration settings is in $HOME/.kde/share/config/gtkrc and $HOME/.kde/share/config/gtkrc-2.0. So, when I used the gtk theme switcher program, gtk programs didn’t notice the change since I was changing the standard $HOME/.gtkrc* files.

Ah hah, I thought to myself–I can be smarter than that! So I created soft links (ln -s) to these files from $HOME/.gtkrc*. And it worked! Once. The very first time I made a change after I created the soft link, the change was recognized. But nothing after that. So I used hard links instead (ln) and all seems to be working correctly now.