GTK4 and libadwaita apps ignore the Omarchy theme

Omarchy themes your terminal, Neovim, btop, Chromium and the whole Quickshell desktop. GTK4 and libadwaita apps are the hole in that list. Open Nautilus on Tokyo Night or Osaka Jade and you get stock Adwaita gray. This is true on every 4.0.x release including 4.0.4, and it was true on 3.x too.

The fix

There is no setting to flip. You have to generate the stylesheet yourself using two extension points Omarchy already supports: theme templates and the theme-set hook.

1. Create a template so every theme switch produces a palette file:

mkdir -p ~/.config/omarchy/themed
cat > ~/.config/omarchy/themed/gtk.css.tpl <<'EOF'
@define-color window_bg_color {{ background }};
@define-color window_fg_color {{ foreground }};
@define-color view_bg_color {{ background }};
@define-color view_fg_color {{ foreground }};
@define-color headerbar_bg_color {{ lighter_background }};
@define-color headerbar_fg_color {{ foreground }};
@define-color sidebar_bg_color {{ dark_background }};
@define-color sidebar_fg_color {{ foreground }};
@define-color card_bg_color {{ lighter_background }};
@define-color card_fg_color {{ foreground }};
@define-color popover_bg_color {{ lighter_background }};
@define-color popover_fg_color {{ foreground }};
@define-color dialog_bg_color {{ lighter_background }};
@define-color dialog_fg_color {{ foreground }};
@define-color accent_bg_color {{ accent }};
@define-color accent_fg_color {{ background }};
@define-color accent_color {{ accent }};
@define-color destructive_bg_color {{ red }};
@define-color error_bg_color {{ red }};
@define-color success_bg_color {{ green }};
@define-color warning_bg_color {{ yellow }};
EOF

omarchy-theme-set-templates expands every .tpl in that directory against the incoming theme’s colors.toml, and user templates take priority over Omarchy’s own. The result lands at ~/.local/state/omarchy/current/theme/gtk.css.

2. Create a hook that installs the generated file where GTK4 actually reads it:

mkdir -p ~/.config/omarchy/hooks/theme-set.d
cat > ~/.config/omarchy/hooks/theme-set.d/50-gtk4-palette <<'EOF'
#!/bin/bash
src="$HOME/.local/state/omarchy/current/theme/gtk.css"
[[ -f $src ]] || exit 0
mkdir -p "$HOME/.config/gtk-4.0"
cp "$src" "$HOME/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css"
pkill -x nautilus 2>/dev/null
EOF

omarchy-hook runs every file in theme-set.d with bash after a theme change, so the hook does not need an execute bit. It skips anything ending in .sample.

3. Apply it:

omarchy theme refresh

That re-runs the whole theme pipeline against the current theme without cycling your background.

Add more app names to the pkill line only if you use them, for example gnome-calendar or gnome-text-editor. These apps keep a background process alive after their last window closes, so a plain close and reopen keeps showing the old colors. Killing one discards anything unsaved in it.

Verify it worked

cat ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css
grep -c '{{' ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css

Every line should carry a real hex value. A count above zero means a palette key in your template does not exist for that theme and the literal placeholder was left in place. Empty or missing values are what produced transparent Nautilus windows in #8380, where the reporter saw lines reading @define-color background #;.

Then open Nautilus. The window, sidebar and header bar should carry your theme’s background, and selected rows should carry the accent. Open the theme menu with Super + Ctrl + Shift + Space, pick another theme, and confirm Nautilus follows.

Why it happens

omarchy-theme-set runs a list of per-app setters after it swaps the theme in. The GNOME one, omarchy-theme-set-gnome, does exactly three things: it sets color-scheme to prefer-light or prefer-dark, sets gtk-theme to Adwaita or Adwaita-dark, and sets icon-theme from the theme’s icons.theme file. That is the whole of it in v4.0.4. There is no gtk.css.tpl in default/themed/, and no stock theme ships a gtk.css.

libadwaita is the reason a binary theme name is not enough. It deliberately ignores gtk-theme and honors only @define-color overrides in the user stylesheet at ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css, which Omarchy never writes. That is the root cause given in #7557, and #9751 reaches the same conclusion from the Nautilus side on 4.0.2.

Two competing pull requests would close the gap. #8408 generates the palette through a default/themed/gtk.css.tpl and adds a Nautilus extension that reloads it over D-Bus. #8584 writes both GTK3 and GTK4 stylesheets and reloads Files only when a window is mapped. Neither had been merged when 4.0.4 shipped on 2026-09-15.

Two limits are worth knowing before you invest in this. The author of #7557 reports that the same trick does nothing for GTK3: a @define-color override in the user stylesheet stays inside its own provider and Adwaita rendered identically with and without it. They also note that libadwaita loads the user stylesheet once when the process starts, which is why the hook restarts the app. Both are their measurements, not ours.

If that did not work

Nautilus is transparent instead of themed. You probably have a stale or broken ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css or ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css with empty color values, the symptom in #8380. Delete both, then re-run omarchy theme refresh. Note that the reporter there blames a 10-gtk.sh hook that stock Omarchy does not ship, so check ~/.config/omarchy/hooks/theme-set.d/ for something you or a plugin installed.

Icons are broken squares rather than wrong colors. Vantablack asks for a Yaru-gray icon theme and White for Yaru-grey, and neither exists on disk. omarchy-theme-set-gnome only falls back to Yaru-blue when the icons.theme file is missing, not when the name is unresolvable, and that is still how v4.0.4 ships. Check with gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme. Two commenters on #7203 traced repeated Nautilus and Ghostty segfaults to the same missing theme, so treat this as more than cosmetic. The workaround in #7203 is to copy the theme into ~/.config/omarchy/themes/, write a real icon theme name such as Yaru-dark into its icons.theme, and refresh.

Chromium is not following the theme. Chromium is themed, through a different path. omarchy-theme-set-browser writes {"BrowserThemeColor": "#rrggbb", "BrowserColorScheme": "device"} into /etc/chromium/policies/managed/color.json and the equivalent directories for Chrome, Edge and Brave, then asks a running browser to reload its policy. Check that the file exists and carries your theme’s background color. The message “Theme is set by your Organization” in browser settings is expected with this design.

Chromium or Brave is stuck on an old accent. This was a Chromium bug in how policy-based themes update, reported in #1888 and confirmed by hjanuschka, who landed a fix upstream in November 2025. Omarchy’s Chromium build carried it first and Brave picked it up later. On 4.0.x you should not see it. If you do, restart the browser fully.

Qt apps. Nothing in the theme pipeline targets Qt toolkit apps either. The Omarchy shell is Quickshell, which is themed directly, but a third-party Qt application is on its own.

Related

• Chromium flicker and hardware acceleration
• Fonts wrong or missing after an update
• Fractional scaling makes apps blurry or huge
• Making your own theme and Themes in the official manual