Launching an individual application with a theme different than the global GTK3 theme This works for native applications, as well as Flatpak and Snap packages, as long as the theme you want to use for a particular application is supported by Flathub/Snapcraft (as a side note, Flatpak applications supportĀ support a lot more third-party themes than Snap). It's important to mention that this changes the application theme for any GTK 3 app, but the window decorations remain unchanged (continue to use the global GTK 3 theme) for applications that don't use client-side decorations. Due to this, it's not guaranteed this option works everywhere (it actually doesn't work with DBus activated applications), and it may stop working at some point.
![gtk 3 gtk 3](https://www.gramps-project.org/wiki/images/4/47/Gramps-gtk3-raleigh.png)
To change the GTK theme on a per-application basis we'll use the GTK_THEME environment variable, which "is intended mainly for easy debugging of theme issues" according to this GNOME GTK page.
![gtk 3 gtk 3](https://images.pling.com/img/00/00/16/63/06/1013730/141491-1.png)
#Gtk 3 how to#
You might also like: How To Get Dark GNOME Shell Menus And Dialogs On Ubuntu 19.10 With Yaru Theme
#Gtk 3 code#
If you prefer to keep this setup (mixed Yaru theme as your global GTK 3 theme, and a dark color theme for VS Code / Atom / Sublime Text) but change the VS Code / Atom / Sublime Text menubar to a dark color so it doesn't look out of place, you could use the instructions in this article to set VS Code / Atom / Sublime Text to use the Yaru-dark theme, while having all other applications use the default mixed Yaru theme. Due to this, code editors like Visual Studio Code, Atom or Sublime Text, which use dark color themes by default, have a white menubar, with everything else being dark. Ubuntu 19.10 uses a mixed light and dark theme by default, but different from the one used in earlier Ubuntu releases: the window title is dark, but the menubar is now light. In this screenshot, Tweaks uses the Mint-Y theme, Nautilus uses Canta theme, Gedit uses Yaru-dark and Eolie web browser (installed from Flathub) uses Plata theme.
![gtk 3 gtk 3](https://images.pling.com/img/00/00/19/98/26/1016445/141404-1.jpg)
you could set text editors to use a dark theme, while using a light theme for all other applications on your desktop. Or maybe you prefer to use a particular theme only for one or two applications, while using a different theme for the rest of applications, e.g. So why would you need to set some applications to use a GTK3 theme different than the theme set for your whole desktop? There are cases in which an application doesn't look as it's supposed to / looks broken with a particular theme, but you want to continue using that theme for the other applications on your Linux desktop. This article explains how to apply a different GTK 3 theme to specific applications (a theme other than the global/desktopĀ GTK theme).