We distribute themes as .hct
files. These are just simply ZIP archives that you can extract manually into your config folder with HexChat closed. Some themes can be found here.
On unix for example you can extract these with this command while HexChat is closed:
unzip ~/Downloads/monokai.hct -d ~/.config/hexchat
The theme manager is an optional external application, which is included with the installer on Windows and buildable on Unix, that simply helps install themes.
Colors are defined in
. Text Colors set the palette for events to use. The rest like background color directly affect parts of the UI.mIRC colors (00-15) are what you refer to when sending colored text over IRC for others to see and vice versa, because of this they should somewhat follow a set of standards so clients can agree 04 is red.
Local colors (16-31) are to be used by HexChat only and can be anything you wish, these are typically what you use in your events.
Text events control the look of every event you see. They can be customized in
using these codes to format it:Note
Always hit enter after editing a field.
HexChat comes with built in icons for the tray, user list, and channel tree (which can be disabled in Preferences). You can use custom icons by placing icons (16x16 recommended) in an icons
subdir, which may need to be created, within your config folder. The icons must be named exactly as follows including file extensions:
To customize more than just text color such as the window borders you must install a gtk theme. Here are some simple instructions for using them on Windows.
The only requirement for themes on Windows is that they are for gtk2 and they use the Pixbuf engine. Themes requiring other engines will work but not look correct. HexChat has also only shipped this engine since 2.10.0.
Before starting you need to install HexChat with the Gtk theme option unchecked. This will avoid the installer modifying your theme or it conflicting with your theme.
Themes can be either installed globally (changing all gtk2 applications) or to HexChat specifically. The latter requires write permissions to HexChat’s install dir (e.g. in Program Files). Global themes are set in %USERPROFILE%\.gtkrc-2.0 but will not be covered here.
This example will use the Vertex theme. Which contains an unoffensive dark theme and mostly uses the Pixbuf engine. Zips are on the releases page.
gtk-theme-name = "vertex"