How to make a fully custom theme for Arch Linux?

[scooterandy11]

Hello! I am new to Arch Linux but I heard you can customise it to your heart's content and I was wondering on how I could get started with doing that. I am not the newest person to Linux around but I could still consider my knowledge of Linux to be little/not very much. if anybody could help me on where to get started that would be great! (Any resauses/websites that explain things would be a great help!)

[Sauron]

you should start out by installing a desktop environment or at least a window manager, then tweak that. customizable in arch's case doesn't refer to aesthetics. theming will depend on your de/wm of choice.

[scotswolfie]

Hi,

 

It's true that you can customize it whatever way you want to do so, just like almost any other Linux distribution. But answer to your question isn't simple. Generally it depends on your specific configuration, and I assume that you want to craft the look of the GUI to your liking. It's not easy to create your very own styling of your GUI, because there are many items to be made for that. If you use some kind of WM, each one of them has its own way to configure it and change its look and behavior. If you use a DE like KDE or GNOME, you need to check out how to create a theme for one of them. In both cases there are different elements to be created or set. I'm talking for example about WM/DE theme, Qt/GTK+ theme, icons, cursors, etc.

 

There are also a lot of ready to be used themes, icon packages and so on. You can find them on websites like DeviantArt or on one of those sites:

• https://www.gnome-look.org/
• https://store.kde.org/

They contain free elements to customize appearance of the two leading desktop environments (though some of them are suitable for other DEs or WMs, like icons for example).

 

I hope that I helped you at least a little bit

[WiiManic]

Poking around /r/unixporn on Reddit can be quite useful.

Z3bra does some useful guides for this too, like so : http://blog.z3bra.org/2013/10/home-sweet-home.html. 

 

Basically though, you'll pick the element you want, ie WM.

Pick the actual WM you want and install it.

Find the config file and edit it.

 

Repeat over and over for your shell, background, status bars and so on.

If you really like someones setup, you can look at their dotfiles usually on /r/unixporn.

They should contain the exact config file that they used for each bit. Mine are here : https://github.com/crossr/dotfiles, for my Arch setup as so : http://imgur.com/a/Scmw1

 

When I started, I found various ones I liked, and then recreated them and built up my own config.