Flatpak themes in BSPWM

Theme goodness and live switching

2018-10-11

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I have some Flatpaks installed. They offer the convenience of using software that is not in the Debian repos or that would require pulling in lots of dependencies.

From a usability perspective, all Flatpaks I have tried are agnostic to the desktop environment. They work exactly the same on a fully fledged desktop environment such as GNOME, or in my custom BSPWM session.

One inconvenience for first time users is that by default Flatpak apps will not inherit the active theme. They use Adwaita or Breeze instead (or whaterver the fall back option is). There is nothing wrong with those choices per se, though it is annoying to have applications look completely different from each other, especially when wanting to use a global dark theme, or just have a consistent look and feel.

Install Flatpak themes

Fortunately Flatpak does support theming and the solution is fairly simple. The user only needs to download the Flatpak version of their favourite theme.

Here is the gist of it, taken from TingPing’s blog.

First, we need to enable the Flathub repo:

flatpak remote-add flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Then it is possible to get a list of all available themes with this command:

flatpak remote-ls flathub | grep org.gtk.Gtk3theme

Here is how I install the Arc theme variants:

flatpak install flathub org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Arc org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Arc-Darker org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Arc-Dark

Now, when I open a Flatpak app inside a complete DE it uses the Arc theme that I assigned in the settings manager.

But BSPWM has no settings manager

BSPWM follows a minimalist approach to design. It quite literally is just a window manager. As such, all the conveniences of an integrated desktop environment must be implemented separately.

Within a generic BSPWM session, Flatpak apps will just use their default theme. There is no way to change it, even after having followed the instructions above.

The reason is that Flatpak does not read from the system’s /usr directory. But also that the Flatpak runtime only ‘listens’ to such configurations from a settings manager program running in the background. In GNOME, MATE, etc. the settings daemon is enabled at startup. Whereas in BSPWM (and other tiling WMs), we have to cater to that ourselves.

The solution is to auto start a lightweight settings manager when logging into the BSPWM session. I have chosen xfsettingsd from the Xfce project, though I expect this to work with any similar piece of software.

Within my bspwmrc I run this (which could be cleaned up a bit):

if [ -x /usr/bin/flatpak ]; then
	if [ -x /usr/bin/xfsettingsd ]; then
		xfsettingsd
	fi
fi

Now Flatpaks inherit the GTK theme of my choice. No more Adwaita when all I want is Arc.

Advanced usage for live theme switching

In a fully fledged DE you go into the theme settings, set your choice and [usually] have it propagate to all running windows. You witness the change as it happens. But in BSPWM there is no settings menu, so no readily apparent way of interacting with these options. The good thing is that running a settings manager means being able to interact with it via the command line. This is also the case for xfsettingsd which ‘listens’ to commands from the xfconf-query tool (GNOME and MATE have something similar with gsettings).

Using xfconf-query has a bit of a learning curve, because you need to figure out the various parameters. But once you get the hang of it, everything follows naturally.

These are the commands I have an immediate need for:

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/ThemeName -s Arc
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName -s Papirus

And their equivalents for the dark theme:

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/ThemeName -s Arc-Dark
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName -s Papirus-Dark

Issuing these commands will have an immediate effect on all running windows. To take this a step further, we can implement a script which handles the theme switch. I already have one as part of my dotfiles, which loads a Tempus theme of my choice. Since the Tempus collection is divided into light and dark themes, I also change the GTK options accordingly.

Here is a quick demo running a terminal, GNOME Clocks as a Flatpak, and Thunar (it is a bit slower than usual because of screen recording):

And here is the link to the higher quality GIF.

A work in progress

This is something I only introduced a few days ago. There may be a few things that I have not taken into consideration or that could be optimised further.

For more on how I implement this, see the “bin” directory of my dotfiles, specifically the own_script_update_environment_theme and the tempusmenu which is an interface for it.

Be warned, I use GNU Stow to manage my dots. Do not try to copy/paste things without accounting for the overall integration between the various parts of my custom desktop session.