How do I change my color theme for i3?

Question

I recently switched from gnome to i3 and was wondering how to change my color theme. I want to set a custom bg and text color as well as font. I have the yaru-dark theme using an app called "Customize look and feel", although I was able to change it to the same theme using another app called "GTK Ch-theme".

The issue is that I can't change it to custom colors. I want to change the grey color to black. When I try to do this using the "Customize look and feel" app, there is an option to do this. However, the option is disabled and I need to install lxsessions and change my current window manager for that, which I don’t want to. How can I set a custom theme without switching to LXDE?

Answer 1

Well I guess it depends on what you need to change, i3wm comes with a config file located at ~/.config/i3/config (or ~/.i3/config with a copy located at /etc/i3/config). Changing this file will allow you to modify the colors of i3wm itself and the i3wm-bar, any per app theme changes I believe must be done with the apps specific config or through a DE running with i3wm. For example I use bspwm running on kde without the kwin window manager.

So if you need to change the colors of i3 get the hex codes for whatever colros you want and adjust the config as necessary, more information can be forund here: https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#configuring

If you need to change the overall theme of GTK and QT apps I would recommend running LXDE with i3 as the window manager instead, here is an archwiki article that goes over the process https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LXDE#Use_a_different_window_manager