Appearance¶
Theme Files¶
We distribute themes as .hct
files. These are just simply ZIP archives that you can extract manually into your config folder with HexChat closed. Some themes can be found here.
On unix for example you can extract these with this command while HexChat is closed:
unzip ~/Downloads/monokai.hct -d ~/.config/hexchat
The theme manager is an optional external application, which is included with the installer on Windows and buildable on Unix, that simply helps install themes.
Theming¶
Colors¶
Colors are defined in
. Text Colors set the palette for events to use. The rest like background color directly affect parts of the UI.mIRC colors (00-15) are what you refer to when sending colored text over IRC for others to see and vice versa, because of this they should somewhat follow a set of standards so clients can agree 04 is red.
Local colors (16-31) are to be used by HexChat only and can be anything you wish, these are typically what you use in your events.
Text Events¶
Text events control the look of every event you see. They can be customized in
using these codes to format it:%C<fg>,<bg> Color code (e.g. %C02,00 is blue on grey)
%R Reverse color
%U Underlined text
%B Bold text
%I Italic text (2.10.0+)
%H Hide text
%O Normal text
%% Escaped %
$t Text separator (tab character)
$aXXX Ascii value
$<num> Event information
Note
Always hit enter after editing a field.
Icons¶
HexChat comes with built in icons for the tray, user list, and channel tree (which can be disabled in Preferences). You can use custom icons by placing icons (16x16 recommended) in an icons
subdir, which may need to be created, within your config folder. The icons must be named exactly as follows including file extensions:
User List
ulist_netop.png
ulist_founder.png
ulist_owner.png
ulist_op.png
ulist_halfop.png
ulist_voice.png
Channel Tree
tree_channel.png
tree_dialog.png
tree_server.png
tree_util.png
Tray Icon
tray_normal.png
tray_fileoffer.png
tray_highlight.png
tray_message.png
hexchat.png
Gtk Theme¶
To customize more than just text color such as the window borders you must install a gtk theme.
GTK themes can be either installed globally (changing all gtk2 applications) or to HexChat specifically.
On Linux application specific themes would work by setting the GTK2_RC_FILES
environment variable but
that will not be shown here.
On Windows application specific themes on Windows requires write permissions to HexChat’s install dir (e.g. in Program Files). Global themes are set in %USERPROFILE%\.gtkrc-2.0 but will not be covered here.
The only requirement for themes on Windows is that they are for gtk2 and they use the Pixbuf engine. Themes requiring other engines will work but not look correct. HexChat has also only shipped this engine since 2.10.0. If you use < 2.12.0 you need to install HexChat with the Gtk theme option unchecked as this will avoid the installer overwriting it on updates.
This example will use the Vertex theme. Which contains an unoffensive dark theme and mostly uses the Pixbuf engine. Zips are on the releases page.
Note that <installdir> refers to the full path where HexChat is installed which by default is C:\Program Files\HexChat. Also these directories may need to be created.
Create the directory <installdir>\share\themes\vertex\gtk-2.0
Extract contents of vertex-theme\common\gtk-2.0-dark\ into this directory.
Create an empty file at <installdir>\etc\gtk-2.0\gtkrc (with no file extension!)
Edit it and add
gtk-theme-name = "vertex"