In the next article we are going to take a look at Oomox. The possibilities about the theming and visual customization of the Gnu / Linux system is something known to all. Since all the code is open, we will be able to change the appearance and behavior of our operating system to a greater extent than in other cases. The GTK theme it is perhaps the most popular way that users personalize their desktops.
The GTK Toolkit is used by a wide variety of desktop environments such as Gnome, Cinnamon, Unity, XFCE, and budgie. This means that a single theme created for GTK can be applied to any of these desktop environments with minor changes. There are many popular very high quality GTK themes such as Arc, Numix and Adapta, which are basically the ones that we will be able to use with this program. If you want customize these themes and create your own visual design, you can use Oomox. On this same program A colleague spoke to us some time ago.
Oomox is a graphical application to customize and create your own complete GTK theme. With your own colors, icons, and terminal style. It comes with several presets, which you can apply in a Numix, Arc, or Materia style theme to create your own GTK theme.
Install Oomox on Ubuntu
For Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint systems, we will only have to download oomox.debpackage from its page at GitHub and install it as shown below. Open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and write in it:
sudo dpkg -i oomox_1.7.0.5.deb sudo apt install -f
Oomox is also available as a Flatpak app. Make sure you have installed Flatpak as described in this guide. Then install and run Oomox using the following commands in a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T):
flatpak install flathub com.github.themix_project.Oomox flatpak run com.github.themix_project.Oomox
For other Gnu / Linux distributions, go to the Oomox project page at Github. Download, compile and install manually from source.
Customize and create your own GTK2, GTK3 themes with Oomox
Theme customization
We will be able change the color of virtually all UI elements, such as: headings, buttons, buttons within headings, menus or on selected text.
On the left, there are a number of presets, such as the Cars theme, modern themes like Materia, and Numix, and retro themes. At the top of the main window, there is an option called Theme Style, which will allow us to set the general visual style of the theme.
With certain styles like Numix, you can even change things like header gradient, outline width, and panel opacity. It is also possible add a dark mode for your theme It will be created automatically from the default theme.
Icon set customization
We can customize the icon set to be used as theme icons. There are 2 options: Gnome Colors y archdroid. You can change the base and trace the colors of the icon set.
Terminal customization
We will also have the option to customize the colors of the terminal. The application has various presetss. You can customize the exact color code for each color value, such as red, green, black, etc. We will find the possibility of automatically swapping the background and foreground colors.
Spotify Theme
A unique feature of this application is that we will be able to have a theme from the spotify app to our liking. You can change the foreground, background, and spotify app color to match the overall GTK theme.
Then you just have to click the Apply button.
Just press apply, and you're done.
Export your theme
Once you're done customizing the theme to your liking, you can rename it by clicking the Rename button in the upper left:
To finish, just hit Export theme. It should be mentioned that we will also be able to export the Iconset or theme from the terminal.
After this, we can open any visual customization application for your desktop environment, and select the exported GTK and Shell theme.
If you are a fan of Gnu / Linux themes, and you know exactly what each button should look like, Oomox is worth a look. We will be able change practically everything as far as the aspect of your system is concerned. For people who just want to tweak an existing theme a bit, it has a lot of presets so you can get what you want without much effort.
I liked this a lot because generally dark themes need a touch-up in the color of the letters because there are parts where the letters are not visible.
I really like what the Themer does. My only wish is that they find a way to brighten the borders around the various elements a bit more. Light borders on dark backgrounds are quite faint.