Geany uses a normal GTK toolbar and sets the [`primary-toolbar`](https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkStyleContext.html#GTK-STYLE-CLASS...) class on it, as expected for main toolbars. The theme is then responsible for styling it as it sees fit.

I'm not very surprised a theme would style the toolbar (and menubar) dark, as many themes do it. I don't think this is a bug in Geany; but please make sure Geany is the only GTK3 application with a toolbar that is styled this way: if it's the case, we might need to further track this down.

Well, GTK3 Geany follows the themes fine here, if I select a theme that changes the toolbars, the Geany toolbar changes to match it.

So I don't think its a Geany problem, its the theme. If we go introducing special handling for particular themes we will likely break others, so its not worth it.

Geany doesn't as for the dark variant, and shouldn't. It's not an application where the UI should disappear like it can be though for a video player or an image viewer; if you want all windows to use a dark theme, use such a theme.

Alternatively, it might be possible to for some applications to use the dark theme variant without modifying them, I don't know.

Actually, to get a dark theme everywhere, you can set `gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=1` (in the `[Settings]` section) in *~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini*. It *might* be possible to restrict that to a single application, I don't know.

@Akronix did you install Geany somewhere or are you trying to run it from the source dir?

Also you can just create that settings.ini file if it doesn't exist (it shouldn't exist by default probably).

@Akronix you need to install it somewhere yes (you can choose where with the `--prefix` configure option). Geany doesn't support being run without having been installed.

If you want to build an experimental version, make a directory say `/some/path` and download and extract the tarball into that directory (creating a `/some/path/geany`) then

``` cd /some/path/geany ./configure --prefix /some/path --enable-gtk3 make install cd ../bin geany -c ../config ```

makes a whole brand new current Geany totally within `/some/path` which won't interfere with your normal system install or your normal settings.

Experiment happy :)

Well, installing it should make Geany work properly, but it won't change how GTK themes it too much. Still, the setting `gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=1` works for me and selects the dark theme -- and assuming the dark theme is what you want, it should work. But I can't say whether this works at the system level, it might be overridden by the session settings or something. Try and put it in your user's config, as @codebrainz said it's indeed probably not yet existent, but you can create it.

Even if this thread is closed and a bit old already, I want to notify, that at least I also and still (mid 2017) would greatly welcome a nice dark theme for Geany. There is one example, who ignores the global settings and goes dark entirely, with a modern GTK3 look in addition, namely gThumb (the photo and image viewer, in my case ver. 3.5.2).

By the way, how does it go with GTK3? I ask, because many other issues like enhancements could be easier to do and fixed within GTK3, besides the theming problem.

@elextr Figures that I would have to create an own theme.

But yeah, as Geany is following the GTK theme of the system, and as there is only few themes, which actually can cover all GTK, XFCE4 and KDE correctly at the same time, it'd still be nice, if Geany would at least choose to be independent from the system theming.

Furthermore (I my humble opinion), one could like a light color theme for daily working like writing or browsing, but has a need for a dark color theme while coding only, without changing everything to dark. As you can see above at @Akronix first image, this is how I also currently use Geany, dark editor theme, but the Greybird theme as frame. It just feels not right somehow.

@Johndeep You have several options to change the theme used by Geany through the regular GTK means. E.g. one for GTK3 is to set the `GTK_THEME` environment variable, like `GTK_THEME='Adwaita:dark' geany`, which will use the dark variant of the *Adwaita* theme for launching Geany. You can also play with the setting I mentioned previously, or things like `GTK2_RC_FILES` for GTK2, etc.

I really don't think Geany should try and not follow the theme by itself; but I guess a plugin could do that. I just wrote such a plugin simply requesting the dark theme variant for the fun of it and to prove my point: https://github.com/b4n/geany-plugin-dark-theme

@Johndeep you can style anything in the UI any way you want using GTK+ theming mechanism. It's out of scope here (and I don't know the details), but Google should have lots of info about theming GTK+ apps (either 2 or 3). There's also some info in the manual explaining the classes Geany exposes to make it a little easier for theming.

If you system is set to a gtk2 theme (a theme, which doesn't have xfwm or so in example), then you can set an arbitrary theme for Geany (compiled with GTK2) by `GTK2_RC_FILES=/usr/share/themes/<your fav. theme>/gtk-2.0/gtkrc geany`

If you have a theme, which has many different supports like Greybird (which has data for GTK2/3, xfwm, metacity etc.), then it seems to depend on what engine is currently used. In my case, since I'm running xfwm, that very theme engine is used and so the command above doesn't work at all.

Call it strange but I'm just observing this behavior.

If you are lucky and your Geany is compiled with GTK3 (like on Arch or maybe Fedora?), then it may be much easier and it is more likely to work with `GTK_THEME=<your fav. theme> geany`

I think.

Since it is GTK3 then, you can also use the `gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=1` mentioned above, but this change **all** GTK3 apps to dark.