Recently, I blogged about using KDE applications in Hyprland.

But what about theming and styling them?

I’ll show how to do that in this blog post, assuming you’ve already installed a few KDE applications, like Dolphin, Konsole, and Kate (see the above-linked blog post).

WARNING: the strategy shown in this post is not optimal, in my humble opinion. There’s a more recent post where I show a better strategy (in my opinion).

As in all my Hyprland posts, this is based on Arch Linux; I mainly use EndeavourOS.

Let’s install a few packages:

The crucial ones are the “qt5ct” and “qt6ct” packages. We’ll use the latter but also install the former for possible old Qt 5 applications, just in case. The “Hack” font is the standard KDE monospace font, and Kvantum is the theme engine.

Then, we have to set this environment variable in “~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf” (note that we specify qt5ct, but for Qt 6 applications, qt6ct will be used automatically):

Let’s restart Hyprland (I’m assuming “env = QT_QPA_PLATFORM,wayland” is also set).

That’s the standard style of Dolphin, Kate, and Konsole with the default settings:

Let’s open the “Qt6 Settings” application (corresponding to “qt6ct”).

Remember that Qt6 settings will be stored in the file “~/.config/qt6ct/qt6ct.conf”.

First of all, I’m changing the fonts to match the standard ones of KDE:

Remember always to click “Apply” after changing something”.

By restarting the above applications, the fonts now look like in a standard KDE system:

Let’s try to change the appearance colors to a darker setting in the palette:

Unfortunately, the result is a small disaster:

Dolphin is the only application that reacted to the change but in a wrong way.

Instead, let’s revert to the default palette and change the Style to Kvantum (“kvantum-dark”):

The result is improving:

However, it’s still ugly: the icons are mostly invisible, and the Konsole menu bar does not like this change.

Let’s fix the icons first: we select “Breeze Dark.” (Remember: We installed them at the beginning.)

The result has improved: icons are better visible, and in Dolphin, folder icons all look fine:

The rest of the ugly look is due to the default Kvantum theme.

So, from now on, we can try to select a Kvantum theme that makes the KDE applications look nice.

Let’s open Kvantum (“Kvantum Manager”) and try with another theme, e.g. “KvAdaptaDark”:

Now KDE applications look better:

Unfortunately, there’s a white bar in Konsole.

Moreover, Kate does not use the dark settings for the editor. However, Kate allows you to select a color scheme:

For example, by selecting “KvAdaptaDark” here as well, we get a nice-looking Kate:

Remember that Kvantum settings will be stored in the file “~/.config/Kvantum/kvantum.kvconfig”.

Now, you can experiment with other Kvantum themes.

For example, this is “KvArcDark”, which still has problems with Konsole menus:

Or “KvGnomeDark”, which doesn’t look bad after all (probably it’s the best up to now: we don’t even have the white bar in Konsole):

You can further tweak each Kvantum theme and change other settings in qt6ct.

In particular, you can install other icon packages and select another icon set in qt6ct.

Stay tuned for another post for styling Qt and KDE applications.