I've changed my system stylesheet or icons and things broke, now what?

Question

I am using a custom Gtk+ stylesheet or custom icons and I am now encountering problems such as:

• Transparent or illegible UI elements
• A missing image icon in the UI
• Panel icons that are enlarged or the wrong color

How can I resolve these problems?

Answer 1

In general, changing these important system assets is not recommended. App developers consider the existence of system icons and stylesheet classes to be a given. There is no way to ensure quality or compatibility for third party assets. That said, you can:

Revert back to the stock stylesheet and icons

You can always reset to the stock system configuration by opening up System Settings → About and selecting "Restore Default Settings"

You can also use the following Terminal command to reset the gsettings keys for the stylesheet and icons respectively:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme
gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme

File an issue report for the custom assets

You can try reporting the issue to the designers/developers of the custom assets that you downloaded. They may have an issue tracker or a forum or other place where they accept feedback.

Do not file issue reports against elementary OS for problems with custom assets. There is nothing that elementary developers can do to fix assets distributed by 3rd parties.

Try to modify the assets yourself

If you have enabled the Gtk Inspector debug gsettings key, in many cases you can use Gtk Inspector to see what style classes or icon names that a specific widget is looking for. Using this information, you can copy those missing pieces from the stock assets to your custom assets. This will likely require some understanding of CSS stylesheets and may cause things to become even more broken if not done properly. It is not recommended to try this unless you really know what you're doing.

You can find the stock elementary icons at this location on your disk:

/usr/share/icons/elementary

You can find the stock elementary stylesheet at this location:

/usr/share/themes/elementary