Dark Adwaita and HighContrast Themes for Qt

One of our goals for Fedora Workstation is to run Qt applications in GNOME as seamlessly as possible. Their look should be as close to their GTK+ counterparts as possible, you shouldn’t have to set things on two different places just to make the change in both GTK+ and Qt applications.

A while back, we introduced the Adwaita theme for Qt and QGnomePlatform which makes sure all settings get translated from the GTK+ world to the Qt one. The original Adwaita theme was written from scratch. To write a theme for Qt is pretty complex and the look of Adwaita for Qt was close to Adwaita for GTK+, but not close enough. Then Martin Bříza, who is working on this, decided to change the approach and based the new version on the default KDE theme and kept changing it until he got a theme that is very similar to Adwaita for GTK+. And indeed it’s now much closer than the first version.

Martin also worked on the dark variant of Adwaita for Qt, so that if you switch to this variant, Qt apps still don’t look out of place. Or if there is a Qt app that uses a dark theme it can have a look that fits into GNOME.

Martin didn’t stop there. GNOME also offers a high contrast theme for those with visual impairment which prevents them from using standard themes. They’re also not left behind. If you switch to the HighContrast theme in GNOME Qt apps will switch to it, too.

On the video below, you can see a mix of Qt and GTK+ apps and how they change when you switch between different themes:

These changes should land in Fedora 26 Workstation, but you can already try them out. Martin created a Copr repository. Keep in mind it’s work in progress. If you’d like to report bugs or help with tuning the themes, all the code is on Github.

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Dark title bars for apps with dark UI

I really like the polished look of GNOME and its default theme Adwaita, but there is one thing that has been bugging me for some time. By default server side window decorations are light and if an app has a dark UI and uses a server side window decorations, you get a dark window with a light title bar. It doesn’t look every nice and when you maximize the window, it’ll get even worse because you get a nice black-and-white hamburger (black top bar, light title bar, and dark window content).

There are quite a few apps suffering from this: Atom, Firefox Developer Edition, Blender,…

But Mutter actually allows the clients to set a theme for their window decorations even though they’re rendered on the server side. They just need to set an x window property GTK_THEME_VARIANT=dark.

And I think the difference speaks for itself:

You can test it by executing: xprop -f _GTK_THEME_VARIANT 8u -set _GTK_THEME_VARIANT dark

and clicking the window where it should apply.

Are you a user of one of the apps that would benefit from it? Or even a contributor? Try to convince the project to implement this tiny change. If you’re a distro maintainer of such an app, you may consider applying a small patch.