Example of making the GTK widgets dark in Geany without changing the whole environment

geany_gtk_dark.md

It turns out you can have separate GTK rc files for separate apps, just by setting an environment variable. For this example I'm using this theme: https://github.com/axxapy/Adwaita-dark-gtk2

First, clone the GTK theme you want into a directory such as ~/.config/geany/gtk

mkdir ~/.config/geany/gtk2/
cd ~/.config/geany/gtk2/
git clone git@github.com:axxapy/Adwaita-dark-gtk2.git

That's it. You only have to do that part once. Now any time you run geany, just set an environment variable first, like so:

GTK2_RC_FILES=~/.config/geany/gtk2/Adwaita-dark-gtk2/gtk-2.0/gtkrc geany

Or if you use a menu to launch programs, use the command like this:

bash -c 'GTK2_RC_FILES=~/.config/geany/gtk2/Adwaita-dark-gtk2/gtk-2.0/gtkrc geany %F'

NOTE: This theme has a dark scrollbar that's hard to see in Geany. So to fix this, open the above mentioned gtkrc file and find this section:

# Scrollbar
style "murrine-scrollbar" = "murrine-wider" {
 bg[NORMAL] = shade (.65, @bg_color)
 bg[PRELIGHT] = @selected_bg_color
 bg[ACTIVE] = @selected_bg_color

and replace the second line with this:

 bg[NORMAL] = @selected_bg_color

or some other color value.