Variant II of changing GTK+ Settings. XSettingsD is a small replacement for the GNOME-Settings-Daemon, suitable for non-GNOME and/or minimalistic environments.

The GNOME-Settings-Daemon is responsible for applying GTK+ settings, XSettingsD is a more lightweight replacement.

I. Install the XSettingsD:

for building from source, you need scons, which you either install from your distributors repositories, or -if not available there- get from http://www.scons.org/.

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git clone git://github.com/derat/xsettingsd.git
cd xsettingsd
scons
sudo install -m755 xsettingsd /usr/bin/
sudo install -m755 dump_xsettings /usr/bin/

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II. re-using existing settings:

the following command will convert our existing GNOME-Configuration to a XSettingsD one.

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dump_xsettings > $HOME/.xsettingsd

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III. running xsettingsd:

simply issue the following command.

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xsettingsd

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If you want to use a different configurationfile, issue that command instead.

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xsettingsd --config=CONFIGFILE

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IV. changing settings:

for changing the settings, either use gnome-appearance-properties and re-issue dump_xsettings, or open the file $HOME/.xsettingsd and change manually.

V. reloading settings while already running:

if you changed the settings while xsettings was already running, you don’t need to kill it and start it again, simply issue the following command to let it reload the configuration:

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killall -HUP xsettingsd

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All that is remaining, is to add it to the autostarted applications.

Have Fun!