KDE customization and theming

This article helps with the customization of KDE 3.5.x.

Tips and Hints

• Installing a custom icon set can be done directly from the Control Center, but then the .tar.gz archive must be selected - do not unpack it.
• Basically, almost all can be controlled from the Control Center: Style, Window Decorations, Icons, Colors are the most important modules (in "Appearance & Themes").
• Do not choose Force fonts DPI on the Fonts module (KDE's control panel). Else the font sizes will be strange... You can choose to anti-alias your fonts (or not), but I think this will work only if Composite is enabled and kwin/kicker compiled with the xcomposite USE flag (see below).

Initial Configuration

• You can change the mouseover effects on the taskbar icons on Desktop -> Panels -> Appearance.
• Set the number of desktops with Desktop -> Multiple Desktops.
• You can change the mouse behavior (double click instead of simple click) on Peripherals -> Mouse.
• The fonts size should be changed, I usually use: 9 for General, Fixed Width, Window Title, Taskbar, 10 for the others.

File Manager

Features

• Unfortunately it is not yet possible to define two default actions for a given file type. For instance with a PNG image you might want to use the internal browser when double clicking, but launch GIMP when double-clicking with the shift key held.

Konqueror Integration

• Some applications should have their "Enable Launch Feedback" option turned off, else this confuses KDE. This is the example of some applications that are already loaded (open), but that we open again from Konqueror in order to edit a file. For example, Quanta-Plus falls in this category.
• Subversion integration is available via the KDEsvn package. There is also built-in SVN integration in KDE, but it is not as good and probably should not be used.
• Ark (support for extracting and compressing archives) integration is available.

Xorg transparency effects via Composite

• These effects are much less impressive than those of Beryl/Compiz, but a lot stabler. To activate these, add the xcomposite USE flags to kwin and kicker. Then add the following line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
        Option      "Composite"   "Enable"
EndSection

To enable the effects open KDE's control panel.

Beryl Installation

• The best way to customize KDE is probably to install Beryl. To use Beryl with KDE, select Aquamarine as the window decorator. I like to use the Crystal module in Window Decorations.

• Add to the file /etc/env.d/99kde-env (use this file, it will ensure that Beryl is always started) the following line:

KDEWM=/usr/bin/beryl-manager

GTK Applications

• To make GTK applications use the KDE styles, a GTK engine, GTK-Qt, is available. The Portage package name is gtk-engines-qt. On amd64 the stable version seems to be 0.7-r1, I could not get the latest ebuild to work correctly. Update: it seems you need to change the settings at least once on the Control Center for this engine to start working.

• On the whole, this engine seems to work pretty well, with the exception of Firefox. This is because Firefox uses 32 bit libraries. I don't know the location of the configuration file for GTK-Qt.

• A much better option than GTK-Qt is to use the latest QtCurve theme, available both for KDE and GTK2. Compile it yourself as I am not sure of the versions in Portage.

• Update: QtCurve is now available in Portage (for Qt & GTK). See this link on the Gentoo Wiki. The main thing you need to do once you emerge both QtCurve packages is configure the KDE part by going to the control panel; and then run this command to configure the GTK applications:

cp /usr/share/themes/QtCurve/gtk-2.0/gtkrc /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

• You can now use the GTK control panel in KDE to set the theme directly (Application Appearance -> GTK). However, it seems QtCurve for GTK 3 is not yet available in Portage.

Useful links

There are a few themes that are present in Portage. The majority however must be manually downloaded and installed, for example from the following website.

• KDE-Look website