nwg-look

This application is a part of 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

Clone the repository, cd into it.
make build
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