Launching applications using a certain theme on Arch

So i have been busy with midterm exams and basically just not writing anything somewhat related down. i have abandoned Windows on everything but my mid spec gaming rig, but with steam os in the making, i am hoping to ditch windows soon enough.

That have left me distro hopping all around, but i keep coming back to Linux Mint since 15 and up to 17.1, i'm on debian and ubuntu for my servers, and switched over to Arch Linux on my laptop a few months back. Talk about a distribution that will force you to learn, patch and learn some more about your system.

I have been meaning to write down a few things here, mainly to remind myself somewhere down the line if i run into the same problem.

One thing i have found helpful as a workaround for problems with customizing my own OS themes, and having applications break from GTK errors and the like, is launching a program using a specific theme. In my case i have used the Adwaita theme, for it's basic allround functionality.

So to run a custom command launching a program using the Adwaita theme i do:

GTK2_RC_FILES=/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/gtkrc agave

where "agave" is my application name to be replaced with whatever you want to launch.

For launching a application using its gtk3 theme simple structure the command as such:

GTK_THEME=Adwaita agave


edit: you need to include a export statement to your bashrc

export GTK_PATH="$GTK_PATH:/usr/share/themes/"