nwg-look

This application is a part of the nwg-shell project.

Contributing: please read the general contributing rules for the nwg-shell project.

Nwg-look is a GTK3 settings editor, designed to work properly in wlroots-based Wayland environment. The look and feel is strongly influenced by LXAppearance, but nwg-look is intended to free the user from a few inconveniences:

• It works natively on Wayland. You no longer need Xwayland, nor strange env variables for it to run.
• It applies gsettings directly, with no need to use workarounds. You don't need to set gsettings in the sway config file. You don't need the import-gsettings script.

Dependencies

• go 1.18 (just to build)
• gtk3
• xcur2png

Depending on your distro, you may also need to install gotk3 dependencies.

Installation

1. Clone the repository, cd into it.
2. make build
3. sudo make install

Usage

$ nwg-look -h
Usage of nwg-look:
  -a    Apply stored gsetting and quit
  -d    turn on Debug messages
  -r    Restore default values and quit
  -v    display Version information

The -a flag has been added just in case. When you press the "Apply" button, in addition to applying the changes, a backup file is also created. You may apply gsetting again w/o running the GUI, by just nwg-look -a. No idea if it's going to be useful in real life. ;)

Usage in sway

The default way to apply GTK setting on sway Wayland compositor has been described in the GTK 3 settings on Wayland Wiki section. You no longer need it. Nwg-look loads and saves gsettings values directly, and does not care about the ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini file. It only exports your settings to it, unless you use the -n flag.

Therefore, if your sway config file contains either

set $gnome-schema org.gnome.desktop.interface

exec_always {
    gsettings set $gnome-schema gtk-theme 'Your theme'
    gsettings set $gnome-schema icon-theme 'Your icon theme'
    gsettings set $gnome-schema cursor-theme 'Your cursor Theme'
    gsettings set $gnome-schema font-name 'Your font name'
}

or if you use the import-gsettings script:

exec_always import-gsettings

to parse and apply the settings.ini file, remove these lines.

Backward compatibility

Some gsetting keys have no direct counterparts in the Gtk.Settings type. While exporting the settings.ini file, nwg-look uses the most similar values:

gsettings	Gtk.Settings
font-hinting	gtk-xft-hintstyle
font-antialiasing	gtk-xft-antialias
font-rgba-order	gtk-xft-rgba

Some Other settings have been left just for LXAppearance compatibility, and possible use of your settings.ini file elsewhere:

• Toolbar style
• Toolbar icon size

have been deprecated since GTK 3.10, and the values are ignored.

• Show button images
• Show menu images

have been deprecated since GTK 3.10, and have no corresponding gsettings values.

• Enable event sounds
• Enable input feedback sounds

don't seem to change anything in non-GNOME environment.