Equilux Theme

The Equilux Theme provides a couple of full-dark, neutral-gray theme for GNOME/GTK+ based desktop environments. It supports GTK+ 3, GTK+ 2, GNOME Shell, Budgie, MATE, Unity, LightDM, GDM, Chrome theme, etc.

It is based on the Materia Theme. For detailed features and documentation, please, check upstream.

Motivation

The Equilux themes provide a neutral dark-balanced color-scheme not designed to be fancy, but to be useful for a few specific goals.

1. Minimize eye strain: when you pass many hours in front of the screen or you are hyper-sensitive to light, saturation and contrast, your eyes will benefit from a dull UI

2. Avoid disrupting your circadian rhythms: a neutral color-cast-free UI helps your body to produce enough melatonin at night time and sleep better, working nicely with software like f.lux, redshift, NightLight, ...

3. Professional use in image editing, graphic design, 3D rendering: in that fields any color cast or excessive contrast, brightness or darkness introduced by the UI would affect the overall perception of the color and balance of the images

4. You may just like it: even if the style is not the main goal, many people find that its very clean and minimalistic UI looks cool and professional

Technical Focus

The Equilux Theme sticks to the upstream theme as much as possible, and is exclusively focused on the following points:

• Total removal of any color cast from the background elements (neutral base)
• Use of a neutral base for all the UI elements, with exception of a few button/boxes
• Maximum reduction of contrast/saturation
• Medium overall brightness/darkness of the UI

Changes from the Upstream Theme

• The installer script installs only the Equilux variants
• Addition of Ubuntu font family and removal of the "M+ c1" font.
• A few minor cosmetic fixes
• Minimal changes in the color assignations in order to make the Equilux palette work OK with the theme.

Theme Installation/Uninstallation

Installation: Download the latest equilux-theme-*.tar.xz version listed in the Files tab here, unzip it and move the Equilux* dirs to /usr/share/themes. As an alternative you can download the source of the latest release here and run the install.sh script as privileged user.

Uninstallation: Delete the installed directories: sudo rm -rf /usr/share/themes/Equilux{,-compact}

Font Customization

After you install the themes, you may want to customize the fonts by editing the font-family CSS rule inside the installed CSS file(s) /usr/share/themes/Equilux{,-compact}/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css.

Here is the current line that affects the fonts:

font-family: Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, Sans-Serif;

You can edit it manually with any text-editor, or you can run a simple command (courtesy of nana-4). Just remember to edit the "your-preferred-font" string :).

For example: prepending your-preferred-font:

sudo sed -i 's/Roboto/your-preferred-font, Roboto/g' /usr/share/themes/Equilux{,-compact}/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css

or switching priority between Roboto and Ubuntu:

sudo sed -i 's/Roboto, Ubuntu/Ubuntu, Roboto/g' /usr/share/themes/Equilux{,-compact}/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css

or change it as you prefer.

GDM Theme Installation/Uninstallation

See the the upstream instruction here.

Related Items

A quick list of items that - for different reasons - fit well with the Equilux style and concept. Please, submit your suggestions as a new Issue, so I will add a note in this section.

Wallpapers

Seamless textures from various sources and authors, converted to low contrast/brightness grayscale available in the Files tab here

Icons

• Circle Numix Icons: a circle themed icon set well maintained and not too bright (if you use Numix Folders below to tame the folder colors)

• Numix Folders: Customization script to change the colors and style of the numix folders (otherwise too bright and saturated). Recommended settings: Style: 6, Primary color: #9c9c9c, Secondary color; #9c9c9c, Symbol: #656565

• Zafiro icons: a flat theme with "washed" pastel colors

• Papirus-Icon-Theme: a flat, sticker-like icon theme with a few variants (recommended Papirus-Dark)

• Papirus Folders Script: Customization script to change the colors of the papirus folders. Recommended command: papirus-folders -C grey --theme Papirus-Dark

GNOME Extensions

• Darker Overview: Customize the darkness of the background in the Overview. It can also remove the ugly vignette effect

• Desaturate All: Desature the entire gnome workspace (I hacked a copy to have 4 deaturation levels instead of all-or-none: ask if interested)

• AppMenu Regular Icons: Disables Symbolic Icons in the app menu. In the mostly grayscale UI, a small colored icon is useful to quickly identify the app you are in. Besides it normalizes the icons that otherwise would be grey or colored with no particular consistence.

• Background Logo: Overlay an icon/pict in the bottom right corner. A bit buggy and useless :) but a nice touch.

App Themes and Settings

• Equilux-Telegram

• Equilux-Flubox

• HexChat: the Zenburn theme fits well with Equilux

• Smyck terminal: a script to use SMYCK palette in GNOME Terminal

• Equilux-Firefox: an Equilux color scheme for Firefox userContent.css and userChrome.css.

• Tint2: tint2 panel theme that matches Equilux.

• TBD: add the style settings consistent with the Equilux Palette for apps like Vivaldi, Tilix, RubyMine, SmartGit, DeepGit, ...

Browser Extensions

• Dark Reader: Chrome and FireFox extension that inverts brightness of web pages and aims to reduce eyestrain while browsing the web.

Branches

Master is always the upstream master: no changes from the base theme there. The equilux-* branch(es) are the branches with the changes from the upstream master. Please, notice that the *-dev branches are getting rebased on top of master at each new release. The old versions will be tagged and will not be removed/rebased.

License

The Equilux Theme is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. See the COPYING file for details.

Credits

• All credits go to the Materia Theme, its author and contributors.