 As many of you know, I am a big ricer. I like to customize every window manager I have to my exact specifications and I change my rice way more than I should. It's definitely something that I spend too much time on when I should be doing things that are more productive and actually earn money or make a difference in my life or literally anything else. Ricing is obviously a waste of time. I don't care. I still like ricing. And one of the applications that I've had kind of given up on actually ever being able to customize is Discord. It's not an application that you can actually customize all that much. It has a white theme. It has a dark theme. That's really all you can do in terms of customizing its appearance as a stock application. And it's just something that I had learned to put up with. And then today that kind of changed. I found an application called Better Discord. And what this application does is allows you to actually install different themes for your Discord. And there's an entire community surrounding this little application that actually gives you a whole bunch of themes that you can try and also allow you to create your own theme if you wanted to create your own theme. So it's really quite cool and it's free. So I thought I would feature it on the channel. Now, when I went into this, I thought, well, you know, this is going to be really hard. Obviously, Discord doesn't want you to customize their application. So they've probably put a whole bunch of roadblocks in front of you and to keep you from actually customizing Discord. But it's actually really easy. So let's go ahead and jump in and I'll show you how to do it. Hi there, Matt from the future here. Before we jump into the tutorial, I just want to make a few things clear that I didn't in the video. And this is mostly from some experience in the last couple of days of using this since I actually record the video with Better Discord, which is what I'm going to be using to theme Discord here in a minute. I talk about in the video how I am unsure of what the impact Better Discord has on Discord actually is. And in the last couple of days, I've actually discovered what that is. So if you end up using Better Discord to actually theme Discord, you will notice that Discord takes up quite a bit more in terms of resources than it did without Better Discord installed. I'm mainly talking about CPU usage. You'll find that Discord takes up around 2% to 3% more CPU than it did without Better Discord installed. So just keep that in mind if you choose to use this that Discord will end up using more CPU resources if you have this installed. The other thing I noticed after shooting this tutorial is that Discord does tend to be a little bit less stable with Better Discord installed. I noticed a couple crashes. So just keep that in mind. I don't know if that has to do with Better Discord or if it just happened to do with some of the plugins or themes that I was using. It's possible that it was just a combination of whatever themes I was using. So just keep that in mind if you end up using this. Now let's go ahead and jump into the tutorial. So the first thing you need to do is go to BetterDiscord.app. And I'll put the link to this in the video description below. And you got to download the application, obviously, and you do that in the form of an app image. So you have to be able to actually install app images on your computer. Almost every Linux distribution out there will allow you to do this. It's actually very easy and I'll show you how to do it in just a second. But first, let's go ahead and browse the website just a little bit. Because there are several things that you can do with Better Discord. The first thing and the one that I'm going to be using for the most is themes. Because like I said, I'm a big ricer. And there are dozens of themes on here that you can download and install very easily. And you can actually change between them very easily as well. So it's not as if you have to go through and install one and you kind of stuck with it. You can change it every single day if you want. It's really just the matter of a click of a button. So basically what these are are just CSS files. And if you're at all familiar with theming Firefox in terms of using the userchrome.css file, Better Discord is actually easier than that. Mostly because it's just a matter of putting the file that you download in the appropriate directory and enabling it. It's literally all it is. So once you've found your theme, it's just a matter of maybe two steps. And again, I'll show you how to do that here in a minute. But like I said, there are dozens of different themes on here that you can choose from. You can download them all if you'd wanted to. Another thing that Better Discord doesn't, something that I haven't actually played around with all that much is plugins. But there are several different things here that will make your experience in Discord better. So like a call time counter will allow you to show how much time you've been in a call on Discord. Definitely something that's missing and probably should be there by default. You can also have this one here for the game activity toggle, which will actually go through and give you a button so you can turn on and off that little notification of when you're playing a game that kind of shows up for other people. That's really also kind of cool. There's a Spotify controls one here that looks kind of cool. I don't know how well any of these work, but I'm assuming that they work fairly well because of the themes that I've used so far have been just mostly flawless. And I'll talk a little bit more about that here in a few minutes. And again, there's just dozens of plugins here for you to try out. Now I'm not sure how well Discord will do if you layer a whole bunch of plugins on top of each other. Maybe it's like your suckless utilities and the more plugins slash patches you have, the more unstable Discord becomes, I don't know, but it's fairly easy to disable plugins and themes. So if something goes wrong, you could just go through and disable them or delete the files themselves. So let's go ahead and show you how to install Better Discord. So you go back up here to the home page and then you just hit the download button. And basically what this will do is it will just download an app image file to whatever directory you choose to download it in. And then you go to your file manager. So I'm going to go to a different tag here and open up a file manager and go to downloads. And then I have Better Discord right here. I'm going to click on it and I get this. Now if you click on this and it says choose which app to open, what you need to do is right click on this and actually can actually show you this. If you right click on this and click properties and then permissions, this might look different depending on what file manager you're using, but the steps are basically the same. And you want to make sure under permissions that execute is enabled. So you want to allow executing file as program. And then when you click on it, you should get this. So you want to click, I accept the license agreement, obviously it has a license agreement. It's actually pretty short so you could probably read it if you wanted to. And you want to hit next and then you want to hit install Better Discord. This is also how you would uninstall. If you choose not to use this, you just click on the app image again and click uninstall. So we'll click install, we'll click next. And basically what you want to do is click this top one. It should be able to find the location of your Discord binary automatically. If not, you'll have to browse to wherever on your system Discord is stored. And then you just hit install. And even if you have Discord running in the background, it will close it, but you don't have to have Discord running. It should be able to do it even if it's not running, but it probably won't restart it. So we're going to hit close here, and then we'll close Nemo here. And what we'll do is open up Discord. And you'll know you've been successful if you get a pop-up. And I didn't get a pop-up mostly because I've already installed this once before. If you notice here, I actually have a theme installed. This is not what Discord normally looks like. Normally Discord is that little kind of purplish blue theme or whatever. This is a theme that I installed. So that's the reason why the pop-up didn't come up. But if you're installing it for the first time, the first time you open up Discord, you'll get a pop-up saying something about better Discord. You can just dismiss it. But like I said, I didn't get that because I've already done it once. So the question is, how do you change themes? So let's say you've gone back to the site here and you've downloaded a theme. Let's go ahead and find ourselves a theme. It doesn't really matter which one it is, but we'll just find a different one. Something a little bit cool. Let's choose this purple one. So we'll just download this and I'll save it in my downloads folder. It's called wildberry.theme. So we'll save this, we'll open up a terminal, and what we want to do is CD into downloads, and then what I want to do is cp wildberry.theme.css into tilde slash .config, if I can type, and then into better Discord, and then themes, okay, and just hit enter so that copies that file into the themes folder for better Discord. And then you go into your Discord app, oops, wrong tag, and then you want to get into your settings, which you'll find the settings button down here by your avatar, and then you'll scroll down here to the side where it says better Discord, hit themes. And then what you want to do is just choose the theme that you just transferred to that folder. In this case, it's wildberry. So you can only have obviously one theme enabled at the time, but just disable the one you're using, enable the one you just downloaded, and then that's how you enable a theme. It's literally that easy. Now, plugins are equally easy. If you had a plugin, you just go through and download it, put it in the plugin folder, which is .config slash better Discord slash plugins, and then it would show up here in this list and you would enable it just like you did a theme. That's literally all there is. Now, if you wanted to create your own theme, you can do so in custom CSS, which for whatever reason just doesn't work for me. I can't actually enter it. I don't know why that is. There are, I'm not exactly sure what the emotes functionality here does download emotes whenever they are out of date. I'm not sure what those are. I'm not a big Discord user, so sue me for not knowing what most of these things are. But you could definitely experiment in terms of playing around with whatever this is. There's also settings here that will allow you to alter some preferences for Discord that they don't really allow you to change. For example, showing a 24-hour timestamp, hiding the gift button, making a minimal mode, adding colored text, and so on and so forth. There's just quite a bit of stuff here that you could go through and play with. I was thinking that maybe the reason why I couldn't get into custom CSS was maybe because it wasn't actually enabled here, but it does seem to be enabled, so I don't know why that doesn't work. Now, in terms of stability, I'm not sure how stable this will make Discord or how unstable it will make Discord. I haven't used it very long, so I can't tell you whether or not this is going to affect stability. I have used it all day and I haven't had a single crash. I'm assuming, again, it's an assumption that it's actually going to be just fine, but I haven't actually gone through and installed any plugins, so it's possible that the plugins are a completely different story and actually cause instability. I'm not sure. Your mileage may vary. I would just warn you to keep an eye on it to make sure that it doesn't crash in the background while you're using it or something like that. You just want to keep an eye out on Discord, at least for the first couple days to make sure that this doesn't cause you any problems, because you are hacking Discord in a certain way. This is doing something that the people who develop Discord don't want you to do, so because you're actively doing that against the way Discord is supposed to function, things might go wrong, just FYI. Okay, so that is how you theme Discord. Again, it's very easy. I love this app. I'm going to be downloading a ton of themes, because I'll probably change them every day, because that's what I do. So if you have used this app before or if this app looks interesting to you, let me know in the comments below. Make sure you like, comment, and subscribe, all that kind of stuff. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at Patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take one more thing. My current patrons Devon, Marcus, Meglyn, Donnie, Sven, East Coast Web, Chris, Mitchell, Mr. Fox, American Camp. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.