Change GTK Themes in EXWM

[jonascant]

I would like to create my own function to toggle between light and dark themes. However, I would also like to toggle between GTK themes (adwaita -> adwaita-dark). Hopefully firefox will recognize the GTK theme and also adjust accordingly.

However, i can't find a way to change the GTK Theme outside of gnome. I tried editing the .config/gtk* files, the gsettings and the gtk-chtheme and gtk-theme-swtich packages. Nothing changed my themes for Evince or Nautilus.

I am using Debian experimental with emacs 28.1

Thanks

[Stebalien]

This can be done without messing with config files by implementing the xsettings protocol: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/xsettings-spec/xsettings-latest.html.

See xsettingsd for a simple implementation.

[medranocalvo]

Interesting. That spec seems approachable. Is that something EXWM should offer? Do you know how does one discover the available settings and their types?

[jonascant]

Thanks for the help. I found a solution with gsettings. I think this will only work, if GNOME is installed on the system. Also i found, that all gtk configfiles must be removed. Otherwise gsettings does not seem to work. Even still, this does sometimes not work, for somereasen. I would be happy, if someone could improve this.

I use two different polybar configs, depending on dark or light theme. Thats the purpose of jd/start-panel

 ;Determin weather to load dark or light theme:
  (defun get-current-color-theme ()
  (setq check-gnome-color-theme
        (string-trim 
         (substring
          (shell-command-to-string "gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme")
          0 -1) "'" "'")))

  (defun jd/reload-theme ()
      "Refresh the current modus theme"
      (interactive)
      (get-current-color-theme)

      (if (equal check-gnome-color-theme "prefer-dark")
          (load-theme 'modus-vivendi)
        (load-theme 'modus-operandi))

      ; jd/start-panel will by itself check weather to load dark or light theme
      (if (fboundp 'jd/start-panel)
          jd/start-panel))


  ; load the theme for the first time after starting:
  (jd/reload-theme)


 (defun toggle-theme ()
    "Switch the whole system from dark to light theme or vice versa"
    (interactive)
    (get-current-color-theme)
    (if (equal check-gnome-color-theme "prefer-dark")
        (setq dark-state t) (setq dark-state nil))

    (if dark-state
     (progn
       (start-process-shell-command "gsettings" nil "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme 'prefer-light'")
      (load-theme 'modus-operandi))
     (progn
       (start-process-shell-command "gsettings" nil "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme 'prefer-dark'")
      (load-theme 'modus-vivendi)))
    (jd/start-panel))