Wingpanel colors and icons don't work well when using the Adwaita GTK theme

[nekohayo]

One of the issues I'm encountering with wingpanel is its colors and icons... basically, I can't see anything when using the Adwaita theme (the official/default GTK theme). I know that's not the "Elementary" theme that wingpanel was designed with, but anyway, I'm trying my luck here.

My context/goal: to be able to use Elementary's window manager + dock + launcher, in combination with GNOME apps and the official GNOME/GTK theme, Adwaita. I just have a very strong preference for Adwaita, GNOME apps just look much better with it. So I would like to be able to have the best of both worlds here: Elementary's speed with GNOME's applications and UX.

So the bug is this: if you use the Adwaita GTK theme (no matter if you're using the "Elementary" icon theme or not) you get this:

If you switch the GTK theme to "Elementary", you get the correct colors and icons:

[decathorpe]

I am aware of this issue, and have already poked the elementary developers ... They are not interested in supporting any other GTK+ theme than Elementary, which is a shame ...

I guess the only way to fix this would be to ship a custom wingpanel.css file for Adwaita to do some overrides, and I have no idea how CSS or GTK+ themes work, so somebody with experience with those things would need to do that.

[juanfgs]

Hello, I'm currently using the theme Aduru with elementary and made an external elementary.css. I've also begun doing one for Adwaita trying to match it's style (it's still in early stages). If needed I can provide the css, however I don't know which is the best approach to integrate it to the repo. Probably we'd need to make a different theme which inherits Adwaita styles.

Some screenshots of aduru version and a gist with it's code: user switcher calendar css

I still don't know how to theme slingshot properly so it has some clashing colors in the category list.

[decathorpe]

This is looking promising :+1:

[juanfgs]

Here I made a small theme package with some tweaks to make wingpanel usable with Adwaita. There are still some issues and some things don't look as good as they should.

The package is here

Here is how it looks

Edit:I'm thinking that alternatively I could try to make a wingpanel theme that mimics the colors of the default Gnome Shell theme (dark grayish with white text). That however would take me longer and require more troubleshooting.