Changing Gtk theme on Windows

If you are willing to poke around inside the Shoes installation and you have the Windows permissions to do so, you can change the theme. You copy a gtk3 compatible theme into your installed shoes - e.g: C:\Program Files (x86)\Shoes\share\themes and then you edit C:\Program Files (x86)\Shoes\etc\gtk-3.0\settings.ini to comment out it's current setting and add your own.

For example, this theme FlatStudio - if you download that (tar.gz) and expand it you'll see there are 4 Themes FlatStudio, FlatStudioDark, FlatStudioLight, FlatStudioGray. Pick one of those folders (FlatStudio for example) and copy it into your installed Shoes share\themes folder. Then edit etc\gtk-3.0\settings.ini so it looks similar to this:

[Settings]
#gtk-theme-name=win32
gtk-theme-name=FlatStudio

Start Shoes - use cshoes.exe -c to see any error messages. -c (Cobbler/Maintain Shoes) provides a quick test.

If settings.ini has nothing set (all commented out) it defaults to the Windows theme), if a gtk-theme-name is set but can't be found or used, then it defaults to a light brown ugly style (Raleigh, built in?)

Obviously, this also allows you to create your own theme (probably by modifying one that is close to your needs). Note that this theme only exists on Your Windows system. Your app running on Linux or OSX will do what they want. If you only care about Windows and you are packaging with exe-shoes then it should copy your theme and settings.ini