Looking for a way to get colorful Xapp toolbar

[Schultz]

I hope I put this in the right thread. Is there anything for Xapps that will add some color to the plain gray toolbar icons? I mean something along the lines like Galaxy or Tango for LibreOffice. I guess this is a theme? I'm unexperienced with themes. But I don't want it to affect my whole system, just the Xapps and a few others, like qpdfview. Is there anything like that out there?

[Schultz]

Since all I got was crickets, should I assume there's no way to do this?

[JosephM]

The Xapps all use symbolic icons in the toolbar. That means your current gtk theme controls the icon colors. Most themes go the same route as the built in Mint themes.

[Penn]

You don't say which version of Mint but I doubt it will make a difference. I am not sure what those Libre Office themes look like but I'm guessing you just simply don't want flat icons, meaning you don't want single color icons. I would like if xapps just gave an option in preferences to use symbolic style icons or just use your theme's default icons but falling in line with the same icon trend I first saw in Windows seems to be the current Linux way, so we have boring/ugly flat icons.

Joseph's way will give you a different single color for the icons but replacing/adding the symbolic icons in the theme you use can give you totally different icons.

To see what I am suggesting, go to /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/scalable/actions and you will find the icons xapps is using, assuming you don't have the same icons in the theme you are using. Add a scalable folder in the theme you want to use in the same format that theme uses and make sure you have relevant svg images with the same names for all the icons.

By "same format" I mean the directory structure. If your theme is the same directory structure as Mint-X it will be /actions/scalable inside the theme folder but if it is like Adwaita or Gnome it will be /scalable/actions inside that folder.

[Schultz]

@ Penn: I'm sorry, I really don't understand your instructions. Step by step, what exactly do I need to do? Oh, and I'm on 18.2 Mate 64 bit.

[Penn]

@ Penn: I'm sorry, I really don't understand your instructions. Step by step, what exactly do I need to do? Oh, and I'm on 18.2 Mate 64 bit.

In order for me (or someone else) to help further requires one of two things.

Preferably tell me what you don't understand from the previous post. Possible examples of what you might not understand include not knowing what I mean when I say different themes have a different directory structure or you don't know what and SVG file is. I say this is preferable because it would seem to me understanding how the icon themes work would benefit you but if you understood virtually nothing that would be too much work for me, lol.

The easier way, for you, would be to tell which icon theme you currently use. Even then, I would only give you information on how to change 1 icon and you would need to extrapolate for the others. But this method wouldn't be as truly educational for you.

[Schultz]

Thanks for the reply Penn. I'm using Mint-x theme, and I do know what a .svg file is.

Even then, I would only give you information on how to change 1 icon and you would need to extrapolate for the others.

If you can do that, I'm sure I can figure out the rest.

[Penn]

My apologies Schultz, I forgot about this thread.

First you need to decide on an icon to replace. The one I will walk you through will be the new document icon in xed which is the furthest left on the toolbar.

Now you need an svg format of an image you find acceptable. Two ways to get this. Acquire an image in a different format and convert it to svg in something like Inkscape or find one that was created as an svg to begin with. The sample I will give will be the one used in Gnome. You could just go to the one that is in Mint by default and convert it. /usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/actions/document-new.png and convert that is possible (if you need step by step on that create a new thread) but I recommend finding an image that was created as an svg because sometimes I have seen programs such as Mint's Software Manager doesn't like converted images (if you view a converted image to one that was created as svg in text editor you will see a huge difference in how they are written). I know as of 18.1 it isn't an issue for what you want to do but I don't know what the future holds. I am using Gnome as an example because their icons are easy to find in the original svg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gnom ... nt-new.svg then right click where it says original file and save it.

This next step is something I recommend but might not be necessary. When altering any type of theme I create a new one. Copy the whole Mint-X directory /usr/share/icons/Mint-X to the hidden directory in your home folder ~/.icons then rename it from Mint-X to a new name like "MyTheme".

Now you need to create a new folder in actions called scalable in your new theme. ~/.icons/MyTheme/actions/scalable . Place the .svg in there but you still need to rename it. Go to /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/scalable/actions and find the icon you are replacing by creating the scalable folder to get the correct name of the icon you are replacing, in this case "document-new-symbolic.svg" and rename the image in the folder you just place in ~/.icons/MyTheme/actions/scalable

Now open Themes in system settings and change your icon theme to the newly created theme, in this example it was MyTheme. Open Xed and enjoy the fact you changed one icon. Now you need to replace all the others one by one.

Sooner or later I hope people will start creating gtk themes with the newer scalable folders but for now all I have seen don't have it yet. Even better would be what I mentioned before, an ability to turn off symbolic or flat icons to use the theme's existing icons.

[Schultz]

Thanks Penn. I followed the instructions, but it isn't working right. See the screenshot. One thing I noticed is that all the icons in the scalable folder are 16 x 16. The icon I downloaded from your link is 48 x 48. Could that be causing the problem?

Untitled.jpg

EDIT:
It also changes the icons in the Software Manager. Why would it do that when only one icon was changed?

[Penn]

It seems to have picked up the new icon but recolored it. This could be a control theme issue. Not sure what happened there but I have a few guesses. Try resizing to 16px (I really meant to tell you to do that anyway).

Change the index.theme file to reflect the change in name of the theme.

From the new theme folder open terminal (right click empty space) and try

Code: Select all

gtk-update-icon-cache

Change away from the theme and back.

Reboot.

If this doesn't work I really don't know where I'd go and it is possible 18.2 is different for some reason. The only remaining thing I can think of is open xed in terminal and see if there are errors.

I may have more time to revisit this tomorrow if this doesn't work but I can't guarantee it.

[Schultz]

I went back to Mint 18.1 so for now I'm going to forget about this (but I may revisit it in the future). Thanks Penn for getting me at least part of the way there.