A few months ago I posted a theme called Lavender for Gnome Shell and GTK, this theme took the excellent Numix theme and tweaked the colors to use the same scheme as Sam Hewitt’s excellent but now unsupported Orchis theme. Unfortunately the Numix theme hasn’t been keeping up with newer versions of the GTK so with Gnome 3.18 I ended up re-basing Lavender on Adwaita instead.

Similar to the original Lavender theme the goals were as follows:

1. Tweak the colors to match the Orchis theme in order to work well with Sam Hewitt’s excellent Moka icons
2. Minimize customization to the base theme files in order to make it maintainable so as new versions of the base theme, Adwaita in this case, come out it’s easy to upgrade
3. As a corollary to #2, any CSS changes should reside in an external file if at all possible as I really don’t want to re-edit Adwaita everytime a new version comes out.

So in a nutshell, this is a slight tweaking of Adwaita. If you don’t like Adwaita you probably won’t like this as well. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

While I miss the Dark titlebars from Numix, I’m happy with the results at this point. Hopefully once the Numix sass port is ready for prime-time I’ll switch back to that as a base.

A couple of additional comments on this tweaked theme:

1. I fixed the annoyling line in Chrome between the titlebar and the tabs, it’s also fixed in other apps like Firefox
2. There is a chrome extension which is just a copy of the Adwaita scrollbar extension but the color is changed to match this theme
3. Nautilus has been slightly tweaked with alternating row colors and sidebar color to match the original Orchis theme

You can download the Lavender theme here. Note this has only been tested with GTK 3.18, not sure how it will work with earlier versions.