How to get better looking theme for Synfig on Windows

Those who are familiar with Synfig knows that it comes with generic looking theme out of the box. It is very much possible that the look and feel of Synfig is not up to your liking.
There is a simple hack you can use to apply custom themes in synfig. I wasn’t aware of it either until recently.
So here we go:

  1. Visit the site gnome-look.org and search for the theme you like.
    For example, I like this theme Venta X - Gnome-look.org

  2. Download it and extract the files.

  3. Go to the synfig installation folder, which generally resides in your Program Files.

  4. Go to “\etc\gtk-3.0” directory and create a "settings.ini" file.

  5. Open the settings.ini file and paste the follow code:

    [Settings]
    gtk-theme-name=Venta X
    and save it. (here you have to put the name of the theme. Venta X is the name of the theme that I downloaded.)

  6. Now go back to the main synfig directory, open the
    Share folder and create a new folder. Name it themes

  7. After that go back to the folder where you extracted the theme,
    copy the theme folders and paste them into newly created themes folder i.e. in the "\share\themes"
    That’s it. Now enjoy synfig the way you like it.
    :smiley:
    Here’s how the new theme looks in my machine.


    Screenshot 2021-08-16 105907 Screenshot 2021-08-16 105123 Animation

2 Likes

Thanks for the information, I think Synfig should redesign its’ icons and create a flat version for all the icons.

I totally agree. New flat icons will look better in synfig.

A hero made a proposal: Minimalistic theme · Issue #1458 · synfig/synfig · GitHub

I think there just needs to be an option to change between multiple themes and also allow users to customize the colours of the themes to their liking. And an easy way for anyone to develop themes and integrate them in Synfig. @Kai Thanks for this info though

What I really like about this is that the Venta X Dark theme gives me a dark theme that clearly displays what is/is not selected in the Tool Options Panel. I have a difficult time seeing what options are selected with the default dark theme.

I totally agree, that’s why I like the theme.