In my quest to have a perfectly usable dark theme I found I would require two things:
- The QtCurve Style for KDE Applications
- The darkPearl QtCurve theme for QtCurve and its KDE Color Scheme
Having acquired those, I went on to install and select them via System Settings’s Appearance applet and all my Qt4+KDE4 applications looked neat in their dark avatars. Next I had to make Chromium reflect and respect the native theme settings and found an option for it to “Use GTK Theme” under Settings – Options – Personal Stuff.
However upon switching that on I realized that GTK themes were indeed showing the coloring of darkPearl right but not the widget styling that the darkPearl + QtCurve provide together, despite placing a proper QtCurve .gtkrc and its other known aliases at all key positions. Sometimes it’d work after doing the last action, but only for the current KDE session and it would all go back to simple-coloring hell post a re-logon.
The solution to this was apparently under System Settings’s Appearance – Colors applet itself. I’d missed an option under the Options tab of Colors that said “Apply color to non-KDE4 Applications“. Un-check this and the custom .gtkrc you place sticks like its supposed to. Chromium looks great now! So does GIMP, the second of the two GTK-using applications I use.
