 If you've been following the channel for the last couple weeks, you'll know that I've switched to XFC and I've been having a really good time with it. And over that course of two weeks or so, I've made a couple of videos on XFC. And one of the things that I've been asked the most is to teach people how to make it look good. Because if you've ever used XFC, specifically if you've ever used, like, the vanilla version of XFC that you might get if you installed it on, say, Arch or Gentoo or something like that, it's fugly. It's really, really bad. It looks like it maybe was designed in the Windows 95 era, which is fair. Seeing as probably was designed in the Windows 95 era. But just because it looks like that doesn't mean that it has to look like that. So what I'm going to do today is take you through how to customize or write XFCE from top to bottom. Now, I am not using the vanilla version of XFC because it doesn't really matter what version you use. They're all going to customize exactly the same way. I just happened to have a Zubuntu ISO lying around. So I've installed Zubuntu in a virtual machine and we're going to rice it. So let's go ahead and jump in and do that. So this is the standard Zubuntu desktop. If, like I said, you have installed XFC in another distro or you're using Arco or some other distro that comes with XFC, it's going to look a little bit different for you. But it doesn't matter because the process is exactly the same. So the first thing that you should know or the first thing that you should do is change the wallpaper. Find yourself a wallpaper. That's where I recommend you start off every theming adventure with because you can use the colors from your wallpaper to do your theming if that's what you're planning on doing. Or you can find a built-in or preconfigured color scheme to use. So I'm going to emulate my current setup, which is using grubbox. So we'll need a grubbox wallpaper. So let's go ahead and open up Firefox and we'll go find that wallpaper. This wallpaper will do just fine. So we'll save image as we'll save it in pictures and we'll save. Well, we're going to actually we're going to rename that thing because I hate really bad wallpaper names. I have a whole folder full of bad wallpaper names and I regret my life choices every time I see it. So we're going to call this wallpaper very creatively. I'm sure you'll agree that that's the most creative name for wallpaper that has ever existed. So let's save there easy enough to download and then we'll minimize this here and we'll right click. And now depending on what distribution you are, this may be a little bit different. Sometimes when you right click on the desktop, you will get a application launcher. So it'll be a list of the categories that your applications are sorted in. If that's the case, you'll want to go to settings and then desktop. If you get this menu here when you right click, just click desktop settings. Either way, they're going to look exactly the same. The next thing you want to do is go into the folder, go to pictures, click on the wallpaper. You just downloaded and hit close. That's really all you need to do now. If you want to get rid of the icons on the desktop, you can do so from here as well. Just by clicking on icons where it says icon type, go to none and they will go away. Now I don't like icons on my desktop, so we're going to get rid of those. If you do like icons on your desktop, this page here will help you customize them outside of the theme. So you can change the size, you can change the font size, you can change what icons are actually there by default. Obviously, if you want things that aren't included in this list, you can also drag and drop icons onto the desktop. That's only going to work if this is enabled. So if you want to be one of those people who have a desktop full of a whole bunch of icons, this has to be turned on. Okay, so we're going to hit close here, we're done with the desktop. Now the next thing we want to do really is going to be the panel. The panel is going to be the hardest part for basically anyone and it's not even really all that hard. So the thing you'll need to know about the XFC panel is that it is 100% movable but it's locked by default. So you want to right click on it, go to the panel menu and then panel preferences. And then you want to unselect this part here where it says lock panel. When you do that, you'll see this handle up here in the upper left hand corner and that will allow you to drag it wherever you want. Top to bottom, if you have it set to horizontal. If you want it to be vertical, you do it like so and then you can drag it left or right and put it wherever you want. Okay, I'm going to leave it horizontal because again, we're going to be mimicking my setup. So I have the bar in the bottom. So I'm going to drag it down here to the bottom. Now I'm not going to drag it all the way to the bottom and said I'm going to leave it up right there. Now the next thing I want to do is change the length to about 65. So we're going to do 65. We went to a bit too far. 66 is fine. And then we're going to drag it to the center. Now this is the one flaw that I've found in the XFC panel is that as far as I'm aware, there's no good way to center it. If you have a floating panel like this, if you want to center it, you're going to have to do it on your own just by using your eye holes. So I'm going to attempt to judge where the center is that looks about right and then we'll leave it there. Now I'm also going to increase the row size up to about 29 I think or so. Maybe a little more, maybe about 32. We can always change this later on if we need to. So there's that. Now we're not done with the panel. You could stop here obviously if you wanted to. But if you want to have my setup with the rounded corners and stuff like that, we're going to have to continue on. So the next thing we'll want to do is change the items. Now in some places you'll see these cult items. In some places you'll see them called applets. It doesn't matter what you call them. Basically they're widgets on your bar. So the first thing we'll want to do is go to this tab here. And what we're going to want to do is customize some of the settings of the stuff that's already here. So first we'll go to the window buttons. We'll click on the settings icon here. You can also get to this by right clicking on the buttons down here. But it's easier to do this while we're here. So the first thing we're going to do is unclick this. Actually we're going to leave that on. Sorry, excuse me. And we want to click on click show button label. So it just shows the icons. And then we want to edit some of the settings for the filtering. So if you have multiple monitors or you're planning on using multiple workspaces, how you want these icons to show up really depends on how you do your workflow. So I prefer to have all the icons showing for every workspace on this monitor. So I click this one, I unclick this one, and then that one's done. I also change it so that it's always done by window title. So they're just kind of an alphabetical order. You can have them sort however you want. It doesn't really matter. That's just the way that I have it done. So that's that. You also, if you're at this point and you're using vanilla GNOME, the show handle button will probably be checked by default. And that's going to show these three little buttons, no matter what, whether the panel is locked or not. I hate that. So I turn that off. In Zubuntu, it's unchecked by default. So whether it's on or off for you, again, is going to be something that you'll want to handle on your own whether you like it or not. So if you want to leave it, you can if you don't want to leave it, whatever. Now, another thing that you may want to change while you're here is whether or not you have window grouping. So if you have, say, multiple instances of your file manager or Firefox or whatever. In some instances of XFCE, this is changed to always, which will mean that every time you have multiple instances of a window or an application, I should say, they'll be grouped together. So you'll have one icon. I don't like this because it makes it harder to get to those instances. You have to hover over one and then click, or I think you have to click and then click again. I just want to be able to go to the icon and click. So I always have this set to never in Zubuntu. It's set by never by default. I think in the vanilla version of XFCE, it's set to always. Don't hold me to that. I don't really remember. But again, that's another thing that you'll want to see how it fits into your workflow. So that gets us done with window buttons. The next thing we'll want to do is add a workspace switcher widget or item, so we will hit add, and then we'll scroll down. You can also search if you don't want to scroll down and we're going to find workspace switcher will add and then we'll close. Now, every time you add an item, it's always going to appear at the end of the panel. So you can see we have a new thing right down here and it looks not very good. So we're going to fix that. So we'll click on this in order to reorder items on the panel. You hit these up and down buttons. So if you wanted to go left, you hit the up button. If you want to hit, if you want to go back right, you would hit the down button. If you're in vertical mode, obviously up and down make a hell of a lot more sense. Of course, what it's really doing is adding it or moving up the list of items here. So up and down still makes sense, but my brain is talking about the bar. So up and down seems a little weird to me. But again, it makes sense. It's just my brain that's weird. Okay, so anyways, we'll hit the plus button until it goes to where we need to go. And we want this on the other side of the separator for now. We'll add another separator here in a minute. And I'll show you how separators work. So in order to get this to look proper for now, at least we're going to change this. We're going to change this to buttons. And we're going to change this to, we're going to make sure that the show workspace number is off and that it only shows in one row. And then while we'll hit the workspace settings button, we're going to add some workspaces. So I'm going to hit four workspace. And then we're going to name these to something different. So we're just going to call them the numbers. So you can name these whatever you want. You can, you know, you can do like DT used to do and do WWW and then term or whatever. I'm just going to name them very creatively. One, two, three and four. That's really all it needs to be. And then we have a workspace switcher. Kind of what you would see in a window manager. So we're going to do a little bit more in terms of actually customizing how those work here in a minute, but that's what that looks like. So we're going to go ahead and hit close here. We're going to hit close here. Now the next thing we want to do is add another item. We're going to, this time we'll use the search bar and type in separator, hit, click on that, hit add, and then close. And again, add it all the way to the bottom. So we're going to move that up here and we want that in between the whisker menu and the workspace switcher. So right there. And then we want to hit the settings button. Now separators are very simple. And by default separators are going to be this like elongated line up and down. I like to have them transparent, but you can also have them be dots or handles or whatever. I just hit transparent now. Let's just say you want to have things spread out from another. So you see here on the bar, we have this space. How that is done is with this particular separator right here. If we click on the settings for this, you'll see that the expand option is checked. Basically, what that means is that that separator will expand to fit all of the empty space and it pushes the items from the left side and the right side apart. So there's an empty space in the middle. So that's how you would make it so that your separators expand to push things around if you want them to do so. So there we go there. Now, I would always recommend adding separators to both ends of the panel. So the reason why I'm going to do this is because I am going to be having rounded corners on the panel. And in order to do that, you're going to need a little bit of extra space there. And the best way to get space is to use a separator. So we're going to actually add two more separators. So we'll do separator again and hit this and add and add again. Now we'll go down here and take one of them all the way to the top and leave the other one all at the bottom. And we're going to do this and then transparent again. Close. Scroll down here. Settings. Transparent again. Hit close. Now all that does is add some padding along the edges so that the rounded corners don't look so bad. Now, this is where I'm going to leave you for the items. Because everyone has different things on their bar depending on what they want to have. Maybe you want weather or maybe you want to have a music widget or whatever. I'm just going to leave this as the default right where we're at right now. This is perfectly fine. You can add your items to your heart's content. It will just add the ones that you want. Put them in the place that you want. Customize the settings. That's how you do it very easily. You click on the thing you want to edit. Hit the settings icon here. You can also right click on this. The item that you want to edit. Hit properties there if you want to. If you're not in this particular window. There is an easy way to get to this or get to the properties of the particular item if you need to. We're going to leave the items where we are for right now and that's really all we need to do. We'll hit close here. Now, basically we're done with the bar. We could leave it here if we wanted to and we just add our G2K theme which comes next. Or if you want to get fancy about it one of the coolest things about XFCE is that it uses CSS to edit basically everything. If you know a little bit of CSS you can get very dangerous. By dangerous I mean you can get very creative or in my case steal CSS from other people which is basically what I've done. Whatever. I'm going to show you how to add rounded corners and I'm going to show you how to edit the workspace switcher so that it looks really cool. In order to do this we're going to need to go into a terminal. We're going to open up here. We're going to type in terminal. If you can type which everyone knows that I can't. You can also do ctrl-alt-t I believe. This is a boon-toot so it should work. We're going to make this bigger. We're going to go into cd.config. If we do an ls here we're going to see a folder called gtk-3.0. We're going to cd into that gtk.3.0. If we do an ls here it may or may not be empty. If it has something it will probably be something called bookmarks. Don't worry about that. You're not going to be dealing with it at all. What you're going to want to do is create a file. So in this case I'm going to be using vim which I'm going to actually have to install. But you can use nano or you can navigate to this file in a GUI file or GUI text editor. Whatever you want to use to edit this file whatever it doesn't really matter. I'm going to use vim so I'm going to do sudo apt install vim. Vim isn't included by default. It continues to baffle me. I mean whatever. I'm not going to get into that rant. I should. I should do a whole video on it. But I'm not going to. Anyways the file that you want to create is called gtk.css. Now obviously you just created this so it's going to be empty. Now the first thing we're going to do is round the corner panels. Around the corner of the panel I should say. So in order to do this you will go into insert mode or however you're going to type this. And you're going to type period.xfc4-panel. So period.xfc4-panel and then you're going to enter a squirrelly bracket and then I always close that bracket just so I don't forget later. I'm going to add a tab and we're going to do border-bottom dash left dash radius and then colon and then you can change these numbers to however you want. I have them set to 13 pixels and then don't forget your semi-colon like so ever again if you actually know where the semi-colon button is you can actually type it unlike me who hit every button around the semi-colon key except for the actual semi-colon key. So we're going to do this for bottom right radius as well. So border-bottom-right-radius and then colon and 13 pixels and then another semi-colon I got it right that time but only because I looked and then we're going to do for the top right and top left as well. So we're actually going to go into visual mode here and yank these and then we'll just change this here. Okay so I'm going to put in the top as well I had to do that off-camera because for whatever reason change word was not working correctly I still don't know what's going on there that was really weird. Anyways we'll also delete these extra lines because we're done there. Now we're going to save and close this and then we're going to type in this right here. So it's called this is basically going to restart the panel so we're going to restart it doing this xfce4-panel-r and you'll want to remember this because we're going to be using it for a few times. We'll do this your panel should go away and then it should start again which it didn't which is fascinating because it does on my system it should start up again. Okay well you want to know what we'll do is we'll just log out and log back in. I'm not sure why that did that that's really weird it must be that I mistyped something in the CSS I'm wondering if I did so we're going to actually go back to that and look and see if we have config gtk3.0 vim into gtk.css now let's see did I mistype something border bottom left radius border bottom right radius border top left radius border top right radius it looks fine to me if you see the panel come back up you'll see that's my system over overlaying the virtual box so don't worry about that it's not actually the panel coming back I'm going to go ahead and log out and log back in and see if it comes up because I don't see anything blatant here that I mistyped radius I scrolled it right bottom left right left right top top border border border it looks fine so we're going to go ahead and close this and we will yes even the right click is not working so we may actually have to reboot as is usual when I make these mistakes or when I find something that doesn't go wrong I leave it in the video so that you guys can see me kind of work through the problem because chances are if I have the problem you'll have the problem too and there we go it worked just fine it just needed a reboot that's not the way that it should have worked by the way I'm not sure why it didn't work the right way because when you do that when you open up a terminal and you run the XFC4 dash panel dash R that should restart the panel not just quit it so I'm not sure why it didn't work the proper way but what can I say but anyways what you can tell if you look closely is that our corners are now rounded and that's really cool they'll look better once those panels or those handles are gone and we'll do that now so let's go ahead and we'll come back to GTK here in just a second we'll go to the panel preferences again we can go ahead and lock the panel now now one of the coolest things about this is that the lock panel functionality means that when you have a floating panel like this you don't accidentally drag it in random places accidentally you know what I mean so always lock your panel when you're done with it it just prevents you from moving it around without meaning to so we can go ahead and close that now again if you don't want to mess around with the workspace switcher or maybe you don't use the workspace switcher you don't have to do this next part but I'm going to do it because I think it's cool now I'm going to need to not type this part here I will put all of the CSS that I'm using in a paste bin that's linked in the video description so you don't have to type any of this stuff either but the next part is about 30 lines of CSS so I'm not going to type it all out because that would just be a pain in the rear so I'm just going to copy and paste it it'd be much easier so I'm going to open up the terminal again we'll cdintu.config again oops and then go into the GTK3.0 and then we'll vim into gtk.css now we'll go down here all the way to the bottom and open create a couple extra lines so we can paste some stuff and I'm hoping that my clipboard will transcend the VM we're going to find out right now and it will so we're going to hit paste so now that I got all this pasted there are five sections and they all basically do the same thing over and over again just in different states of the workspace switcher switcher so whether or not the thing is checked and by checked I mean that it's active whether it is toggled which also means active whether it's in flat mode or hover mode or any of the specific modes that it can have you want to have css set for each mode that the workspaces can be had whether they're active inactive or whatever obviously there's a hover color here and everything so you want to make sure that you have css for each of those states and that's what this these five sections do so you have flat toggle this is the default mode you have the hover you have the checked and so on so you can also set the font here if you want now I'm going to have to find Jetbrainsmono actually to install this so we're going to have to go to Firefox here and actually install Jetbrainsmono so we will go here and go to search for nerd fonts very easy go to the website go to downloads scroll down until you find the font that you want I'm going to find Jetbrainsmono just so I don't have to change that text and it is come on man alphabetical it's not that hard there we go right there we're going to download this it will go to our downloads folder so we're going to actually open up a new tab so it controls t to open up a new tab home cd into dot excuse me downloads we're doing ls here we should see the zip files we'll do unzip and then Jetbrainsmono like so do that and we'll do an ls here we should see a whole bunch of stuff here and we're just going to move it all the way we need to go so we're going to actually do make directory mkdir till the slash dot fonts now there is a unzip there's a flag for the unzip command that would have I don't know what it is I've never bothered to look it up I probably should do that but I don't anyways we're going to make that directory we're going to move everything in this folder because that's all it's in this folder obviously if you're doing it my way you could do star dot tff or ttf like this and then till the slash dot fonts okay now dot fonts the directory that we just created is not the only place you can put fonts there's also users share slash fonts in your root directory that's the place you'll want to install it if you're planning on these fonts being used by other users on your computer or if that's just the place where you want to use it it doesn't really matter either way the dot fonts oops which I actually messed up there I'm going to have to change that because I call it dot font we're going to go up a level and actually change that and make it proper now we can do star dot ttf and then till the slash dot fonts while I wasn't even close I wanted to enter and we'll move everything there or in this case we'll move dot everything dot ttf there that way we have the fonts that we need now like I said the dot fonts directory I think is theoretically not being used anymore I think they call it depreciated but it still works and it's just easier to do it this way so now that we have that done we can go back to the other tab here and I can finish explaining this so it sets the font it sets the font size and it sets the padding up here it sets the border so that the border when it's checked has a white border or when it's not unchecked it doesn't have a border at all so let's go ahead and save this and show you what it looks like now one thing before we leave this color here doesn't have to be white it can be any color that you want so if you're matching the colors of the grubbox theme or whatever you can do so I just left it at white because it looks fine now technically the white of grubbox isn't pure white but it works just fine and it was easier than looking up a code so you can put the hex code there if you want to it would just go here instead of the word white okay so it should be word it should work just fine so anyways I'm going to quit out of that now we're going to see if the XFC4Panel restart will actually restart this time and I'm going to enter there it should come back up come on come back up oh you pain in the rear why aren't you working I don't know why that's not working that should work but it doesn't so we'll do it the hard way I'm sure there's a command for the for logging out I wonder no I didn't think so exit doesn't actually work exit will just close the terminal so we're going to do just reboot again because the right click there isn't working I'm just like I'm sure there's actually a command to log out but I don't know what it is one of these days I should learn that something new to learn okay now type in our password we should have yeah there we go see now you can see that it has a different background but a color and it has an underline over under the workspace that is in focus now one thing that you'll notice is that when you hover yeah the hover color is not that great so for me personally I like the same color as the background of the in focus one so we're actually going to change that so we'll open up a terminal zoom in again cd.config gtk them into gtk.css now what I think we'll need to do in order to make that work is when it's in hover mode we'll want to add actually not sure because mine I don't need to set this at all it was just by default it was okay so let me think about this for a second this is where your knowledge of css is going to have to be pretty good because obviously if you don't know what to do you're going to sit here like a dumbass like me and either have to go googling which is probably what I'll end up having to do or actually know what you're doing in the first place and then you won't have to worry about it so uh pardon the interruption I will go look and see what that needs to be in order for this to work okay so it turned out it didn't take me long because I was able to guess and as you can see I kind of got it fixed it's not where I need to be but I now know what I need to do in order to do this and this time the xfc 4-panel-r actually worked so I don't know what I was doing wrong why I wasn't working before we're going to have them back into here and the thing that I added was background white now that obviously just gives a white background when it's being hovered over and that's not exactly what I wanted to do so instead and honestly you could probably do this in many different ways because that's kind of the way CSS works but this is the the new way of doing it because it's the only way that I really you know kind of know how to do it so I'm going to make this a hex key instead or a color code and the color code for white is 4f's I know that much now I think and I may be misremembering here but you can add transparency to a background color code by adding two additional letters the thing is I don't remember if it's supposed to be at the beginning or the end I think it's the beginning if I remember right so I think you can the beginning with the end we're going to find out because we're going to try both I think it's the beginning so in order to do this I think it's BB something like that if I right and quit this and then try to restart again did that work? No that can just completely reset so that means that is wrong so either the BB goes at the end or it's not going to work maybe that's just a poly bar thing maybe maybe because that doesn't look right at all maybe that's just a poly bar thing and that's the only place that works and then in which case yeah obviously that didn't work okay well let's see how do you how would you do a transparent background I suppose we could just use like a color picker so let's open up a thing here and do at pseudo apt install gpick so and gpick basically will allow you to get the or to extract the color code from basically anything so once this is finished installing which should be here very soon we should be able to open up the whisper menu here and type in gpick and this pick color and I'm going to right click on this part here copy this code by just clicking on it and then we're going to go back here we're going to change this because obviously this did not work honestly didn't expect it to work but apparently that's just a poly bar thing and then we're just going to paste that in so we should right put that and then restart the panel and now haha there you go cool huh now you can also change you can see that there's a very thin blue border around that that's not going to end up working so we're going to change that so that's also on hover so basically I don't think I have it's like this is all this is the border radius for the toggle and check is set here that's for the radius the border bottom color when it's checked is white was is set there so what we want to do is just I think if we just do border and like this and then do one pixel it doesn't really matter solid and then just will paste that same number because we really don't want it to stand out you could I probably just use zero as a border just to get rid of it and we'll try this again and then yeah there you go see cool huh so that's how you go about doing that now like I said at the beginning that is the hardest part of all of this because it requires some knowledge of GT of CSS and if you don't have any you have to go steal some so that's that's basically what I did now I years and years ago I knew a lot about CSS but that knowledge has just seeped from my brain from disuse I don't know anything about CSS hardly anymore I lost all my HTML knowledge too because Markdown just ruined me for everything I just write everything and Markdown in it and then you use Pandoc to translate it so yeah I've lost all that knowledge unfortunately that means that I have to do things like this which is basically just steal other people's CSS which is what I did here I didn't actually steal I had help with I should say so anyways the bar is now done now you're saying man what about your theme now my default this theme actually looks pretty good with grubbox because the bar kind of looks like the grubbox color in fact I'd say that the that color is probably is the grubbox color it's not going to look much different but the next things we'll need to do is actually install the grubbox theme so we can do this in a couple different ways I'm going to try it in the easy way if it doesn't work the easy way then we will do it in the hard way makes sense right so we're going to CD back home we're going to stay in the terminal now if you're not if you're not familiar or comfortable with the terminal you could theoretically do this with just a file browser so you could just download the the tar ball or whatever it is of the theme put it in the appropriate places with your file manager I'm just going to use the terminal because it's easier so I'm going to make two two different directories here first of all make sure that they're not here so we'll do ls-a and make sure that there's not a dot themes and a dot icon so first we're going to remove that really bad mistype I had earlier where I just did font so we'll do that and that way that's correct oops like so now we're going to do make directory dot themes and dot icons now just like with fonts these can go other places as well so there's a slash you usr slash share slash themes and there's a slash usr slash share slash icons and again if you install things there they'll be available for everyone that runs on the system and that's usually the default place where you want to do that I'm just going to do it here in the home directory even though usually drives me nuts but that's just kind of the way that I've been doing it simply because when you use flat packs a lot of the times you need to have non-root access to the themes folder in order for your flat packs to actually follow the gtk theme so it's much easier to do if the themes are in a folder that doesn't require root access in order to change or have access to so I've just been using them in the home directory like this even on my system even though like I said it kind of drives me nuts okay so now if we do an us-a again we'll see that we now have two different icons and themes right here so now we need to go back to firefox so firefox like so okay wait for the snap to open and we're going to type in the grovebox gtk theme now the one that I use I believe is this one here it's the one with the browned corners I think that's the right one of course you're not going to yeah that's the right one so we're going to go down here now if you're on arch I believe you can just do sudo pacman-s installed grovebox-gtk theme or something like that and I think that even on Ubuntu you probably can do that let's just see if that's possible sometimes they put in the description the actual packages names because like I said sometimes yeah opens to as arch debian derivative yep it's right here so we're going to want to copy this right here control C go back to your thing do sudo apt install and then paste that and enter enter your password and it's going to that wasn't the right thing was it that was me being hopeful that was a dependency not the theme okay so we're going to have to do it the hard way because there's not a package for Ubuntu doesn't look like it I'm pretty sure there was a package for fedora but maybe I'm just remembering installing that dependency and not installing the actual theme so we're going to download these so here's where it gets a little bit tricky because you have to know what the connotations of each of these files are in order to know which one you want so in order to do that you have to go down there to their little table here and what you want is the theme with border decoration for gnomeshell or the theme with border decoration I think I want the theme name dash B part so we're going to go up here to download and that's this one right here so we click on it click download and it's going to put it in our downloads folder so we're going to go here and cd into downloads and then we're going to move it into the themes folder so we're going to grab box and then into till the slash dot themes which is the directory we made earlier and we'll cd into that cd dot themes and then we'll do unzip grab box dark oops we got to actually spell things right it's surprising and now if we do an analysis here we'll actually see that that's here now if you were to do this on gnomes you'd need gnomes tweaks but because xfc is freaking awesome you don't have to do that you just go into the whisker menu or the other menu and type in appearance and do like that and then you just select this and now you have the theme installed simple as that now obviously it doesn't work with everything 100% right out of the box so first you have to close this type in window manager and like so and then you'll want to go down here and select the same theme so that they look the same all over the place because otherwise it sticks with gray bird and they don't mesh really all that well so you'll want to make sure you change the theme in both places in the window manager and in appearance that's honestly the worst part about xfc well it's not the worst part but it's definitely one of those things that kind of make you mad why aren't they both in the same place and it's okay man it's gonna be okay alright anyways while I'm here I'm also going to change the button layout because I always change this to like so so that the icons are more mac like and on the left hand side so there we go now the last thing we want to do is find the icons so we'll just go back up here we'll stay and get on look and we'll find out where that pesky search box is usually the search box is right there where they move the search box to it used to be right at the top maybe that's the now you're saying well man it's right over there that's just your search categories alright well script we're just going to go grow box Linux icons and that's the one right there it would have been easier if I hadn't had to go to Google but whatever so we're going to do the same thing we did here we're just download download again it's going to go right into our downloads folder we'll see deep there to downloads and we will see the file we'll see the file right here now why they can't always just use zip or tar why they have to mix them up because I'm pretty sure that they're by the same freaking author but I might be wrong about that actually I think I am wrong about that but it doesn't matter why we can't just standardize on one way of compression I don't know especially I'm going to look like we should all just be one or the other but anyways someone had to use tar which means we're going to look up those stupid flags first we're going to move the grow box file into till the slash icons we'll just do it there we'll see into the icons like so and then we're going to do tar dash z x v f don't ask me why those are the flags that you have to use it's really silly and I have to look it up every single time that's why I have an alias on my actual system and then we'll do the grow box theme like so and then if we do an ls here we'll see that it has been expanded or whatever decompressed if you want to use that then we'll go back to the the whisker menu type in the appearance and then we'll go to icons and we'll select grow box and then we'll hit close now if we open up thunar which is our file manager we'll see that it has grow box icons now there are other grow box icons if these don't suit your fancy because some of them are kind of bad honestly I don't think that this is the one that actually used I think this is the one that actually used it probably downloaded the wrong one no that's still not the one right one anyways you can see how you do this there are several of them to choose from I think that's the same one that I just clicked on only in the kd store it's also possible that this is the the appropriate one and I just went to the github page let's go ahead and download this one and see what it looks like shall we go to the release pages here and choose the zip file format download the icon ok we can do that ok so we're going to go to the releases page click on that click on zip it should be downloaded in the right place go to download and then unzip grow box plus icons now there's a lot of stuff in there isn't there do an analysis and see what well we got wow that directory was empty here momentarily but that's ok honestly I don't know why there's so much stuff there but we'll see if it even showed up because I'm having a feeling that it probably didn't but we're going to find out appearance go to icons and let's see if it happens to be here which it does not that's not that surprising I'm assuming because we didn't follow the directions I should have read the rest of the directions instead of just assuming so let's here download the latest package you can download from different sources ok installation cp into there so that's the other one where did the actual thing go ok I created the proper directory this time so we're going to see if that actually worked even though it had it should work but we're going to find out so we're going to go back to appearance and go to icons and we're going to find out if the thing that we just installed is actually there which it is that's cool let's go and look at this oh those are much better yeah so much better good ok so that is actually where I'm going to stop because this is where your trip is going to differ from mine it's going to depend on what text editor you're using and what terminal you're using so if you're using XFC 4 terminal you can go up to edit preferences and then appearance I believe no it's colors and then there may be a grove box preset here but there's actually not so you'd have to find a XFC 4 terminal grove box theme if you're going to use XFC 4 term I use Tilex there's somebody made a Tilex theme it was very easy to install just google how to change themes in your particular terminal and it should someone probably has already made one for you you'll just have to download it so every terminal does this differently so that's the reason why I'm not showing you so that's the reason why this particular terminal doesn't look all that great but it should be fairly easy for you to find in order to do for your terminal other than that maybe you'll want to do the Firefox so do about preferences and then extensions and themes search for grove box so I always use this one here click add themes add and there you go now your Firefox looks exactly the same you can also if you wanted to change this icon right click on this hit properties hit the appearance button here you want to go down here and then you'll want to search for menu or something like that menu something like this doesn't really matter what you choose something that fits really well obviously none of those really work all that great well actually we can use the whisk menu one here that will work fine that looks much better than the blue icon cool huh so finishes out with the proper Unix porn screenshot just like so and there you have it that's how you edit or customize or rice XFCE fairly easy now there are other ways of doing this obviously probably easier ways for sure but this is the way that I learned how to do it and the way that I've done it now again there are many other things that you can customize you can use a terminal you can change how some of the other icons act you can change the padding any way anything that you want to do you can hopefully get there based on the basics that I just showed you so if you have questions on this you can leave those in the comment section below if you have thoughts obviously comment section below I'd love to hear from you you can follow me on master downer honestly those links will be in the video description I'm also on TIL vids which is a peer tube instance so that link will also be in the video description starting today and support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast links for libera pay and youtube will be in the video description below thanks everybody who does support me on patreon and youtube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you the channel should not be anywhere near where it is right now so thank you so very very much for your support I truly do appreciate it I hope this video helped a whole bunch of people because I know a lot of people were asking so there's that video thanks everyone for watching I'll see you next time