Make QT look less ugly

As anyone who’s used an application written with the QT UI framework will know, they don’t always look the best, and certainly don’t fit in with the rest of your desktops theme in the way GTK does. Certain themes support styling both GTK and QT applications, however most don’t.

Fortunately, there’s a solution, and it comes in the form of a Theme engine. Theme engines act as a small compatibility layer, allowing certain frameworks to render as if they were others. With this, we can tell QT applications to render as if they were GTK.

qt5-styleplugins is a package which allows QT applications it’s components using the same underlying widget components as GTK+2. More detail on qt5-styleplugins can be found on the Arch Wiki.

Setting up qt5-styleplugins is incredibly simple:

1. Install the package from your OS’s package manager. qt5-styleplugins on Arch, qt5-style-plugins on Ubuntu.
2. Set the environment variable: QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2

Installing the environment variable can’t be done in your .bashrc, as variables stored here aren’t accessible to applications launched outside the terminal. I’d recommend setting it in /etc/environment instead.

After install, simply reboot, and your apps should fit in far, far better with the rest of your desktop.