Setting a Dark Theme for Geany on LXQT

By default, Geany comes with a pre-installed light theme and it looks like this:

Geany default colorscheme

Setting a dark theme requires a few things:

  • Downloading a dark theme for the editor
  • Setting a dark theme for the editor
  • Setting a dark theme for the rest of the Geany application
  • Eventually setting a different color for the Long Line Marker

First things first. To download a dark theme click and choose one of your choice on the Geany themes website.

At the beginning of this page, they described how to install the theme. It is pretty simple and easy and takes just a few seconds.

However, if you're like me and you have the Long Line Marker visible on the screen, its color might not look good on the newly installed Geany theme. To set the Long Line Marker color, you need to do this in Geany:

  • Main menu > Edit > Preferences (Ctrl+Alt+P) > Editor tab > Display tab > Long line marker > Color

And pick your desired color.

Setting the Geany long line marker color

Now your Geany might look like this (for the purpose of this demonstration I used the dark theme "Evg-EGA-Dark"):

Geany with only editor theme set to dark

And the only thing left to be done is to set the LXQT widget appearance colors, which we do like this:

  • HOME BUTTON > Preferences > LXQt settings > Appearance

On the Widget Style tab the GTK 2 and GTK 3 themes are set to “Arc-Darker” by default. Set them to “Arc-Dark”, click the “APPLY” button and close the settings panel.

Now restart Geany for the new settings to take effect and your Geany should look all-dark like this:

Geany set to all-dark colors

Enjoy!

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