Using KiCad in a non KDE Setting

I am running Fedora 37 XFCE, with a dark theme. While the applications launched work fine and I’m able to select a workable color scheme, (eagle), the main application and project list tool that launches when kicad is invoked has a hidious almost unusable color scheme. Is there anyway to change this oe even not use this part of the application, and just launch the actual tool sets indiviually

Despite the name starting in K KiCad is not a KDE app but rather uses GTK on Linux, via wx. Lots of people are using it without KDE on distros like Ubuntu and Mint.

I have no first hand experience with display issues but I’m sure someone else can suggest some canvas settings that might help. Just hang in there.

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KiCad depends on the project manager to glue a project together.
If you start the schematic or PCB editor directly from your OS, then there is no active project and KiCad works in “standalone mode”. Standalone mode enables some extra options (such as PCB Editor / File / Append Board) but because no project is active there is also no connection between the schematic and the PCB.

I’m not sure what is so:

I’ve never bothered to mess with color themes myself. Whenever I (re) install linux on a (new) pc, I select some theme that sort of resembles the “windows 95” color theme I grew up with and that’s it.

KiCad supports changing between light and dard UI theme in Preferences → Common. Then it uses the theme which the underlying GTK UI library happens to use. It depends on the distro etc. how you can change how it looks like exactly. For example in at least some KDE environments there are settings for GTK theme. If light/dark of KDE isn’t enough, you have to find generic instructions for ´Fedora/XFCE to know how to change the looks of GTK applications.

Okay thank you all I’ll just fiddle around with the GTK colors and or live with it.

a screenshot would help here :slight_smile: Without that it’s hard to tell if there’s something wrong in your case or if your taste in GUI themes is just very different than mine


This what I get

The combination of white text on a dark background and white text on a light grey background is indeed not very ergonomic. You may even consider this an oversight / bug in the themes coloring and may be worth a bug report.

On the bright side. the big grey area on the right does not have any useful info, apart from maybe the close button. Once you’ve read those texts a few times they are quite useless, and you may as well make the window a lot narrower, so only the icons are visible:

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