Vivid Gradience

Change the look of Adwaita, with ease.

What is Vivid Gradience?

Vivid Gradience is a desktop app for customizing the look of Libadwaita applications, the adw-gtk3 theme, and GNOME Shell. From a graphical interface — with no hand-editing of config files — you can recolor the entire Adwaita palette, generate a Material You color scheme from your wallpaper, theme the Shell to match, layer in custom CSS, and save or share the result as a preset.

It is a maintained fork of Gradience, whose original was archived in June 2024. This fork exists to keep the tool alive on modern GNOME and to build on it.

Where we are now

The project is actively being revived. This is early-stage work, so expect some rough edges — issues and pull requests are welcome.

• Builds and runs on the current GNOME runtime (50) as a Flatpak
• Stays on the latest runtime automatically — a weekly job bumps the manifest and build-tests it before the change lands
• Modernized, adaptive UI built on current libadwaita (ToolbarView, Breakpoint, boxed lists, SwitchRow/EntryRow)
• 85 ready-made themes built in — Catppuccin, Gruvbox, Nord, Dracula, Rosé Pine, Everforest, Solarized and the full Arc and Matcha families, plus three original sets (Pastel, Neon, Casts) — in a visual preset gallery with per-theme color previews, grouped into family sections
• Live preview with contrast warnings — a schematic window at the top of the Colors tab redraws as you edit and flags text below WCAG AA
• GNOME Shell theming works again, on any Shell version, and applies without logging out — upstream dropped it after GNOME 44 because the old engine carried a copy of GNOME's stylesheet sources per release. It now recolors the stylesheet your installed Shell already ships, so it follows whatever GNOME you run
• Five theme engines — Shell, Monet (wallpaper), Firefox, a recolored icon theme (folders stop staying Adwaita blue), and the Desktop pickers inherited from GNOME Tweaks, including the warning Tweaks never had: choosing a GTK 3 theme your Flatpak apps can't resolve says so, instead of silently splitting the desktop
• Your existing theme is never destroyed — applying over a stylesheet Vivid Gradience didn't write offers to import it into your theme library first, and every Apply snapshots the previous state for restore
• Core theming from upstream is intact (colors, wallpaper-based schemes, presets, custom CSS)
• Installs and updates from a signed, auto-updating Flatpak repo (with a one-off bundle as a fallback), released independently of Flathub
• Further codebase cleanup and visual enhancements

Screenshots

 

 

More at superuser-miguel.github.io/Vivid_Gradience — including the Get Set Up guide, a first-run walkthrough from install to a fully themed desktop and back.

Install

Recommended — signed repo, automatic updates

Install from the project's own signed Flatpak repo, and new releases arrive with flatpak update:

flatpak install --user https://superuser-miguel.github.io/Vivid_Gradience-repo/VividGradience.flatpakref
flatpak run io.github.superuser_miguel.VividGradience

This subscribes you to the repo (like Flathub does), so flatpak update — or GNOME Software — pulls new versions automatically. Every release is signed with the project's GPG key.

Alternative — one-off bundle

Prefer a single file with no remote? Download VividGradience.flatpak from the latest release:

flatpak install --user ./VividGradience.flatpak
flatpak run io.github.superuser_miguel.VividGradience

The bundle has no update path — to move to a newer version, download it and reinstall (or switch to the signed repo above, which updates itself). Vivid Gradience is not on Flathub and is distributed independently.

Features

• Pick from 85 ready-made themes — Catppuccin, Gruvbox, Nord, Dracula, Rosé Pine, Everforest, Solarized, Tokyo Night and the full Arc and Matcha families, plus the original Pastel, Neon and Casts sets — in a visual preset gallery, each card previewing the theme's own colors
• Recolor any part of the Adwaita theme with a color picker or hex values, in searchable, collapsible categories
• Watch a live preview as you edit, before applying anything — it marks any text that falls below the WCAG AA contrast minimum
• Generate a Material You color scheme from your wallpaper — pick from nine scheme variants (Vibrant, Tonal Spot, Expressive, and more) and a contrast level
• Theme GNOME Shell to match, applied to your running session — the panel, overview, Super+Tab switcher, quick settings and notifications repaint immediately, with no logout. Requires the User Themes extension
• Theme Firefox's own chrome to match the preset — toolbar, tabs, menus and the Library, through firefox-gnome-theme (LibreWolf and Waterfox too). Every profile gets its own switch, and one you have already themed yourself is left alone rather than painted over
• Recolor Adwaita's icons to the preset — folders, drives and mimetypes follow the scheme instead of staying stock blue; one click applies it, one click removes it
• Pick your colors from the preset itself — every color button opens the preset's own palette first, with the system dialog one click behind it
• Desktop settings without Tweaks — GTK 3 theme, cursor, dark style and window-button layout, with a warning when a chosen GTK 3 theme is one your Flatpak apps cannot resolve
• Apply themes to Libadwaita, GTK 4, and GTK 3 (via adw-gtk3) applications — non-destructively: a stylesheet Vivid Gradience didn't write is offered a place in your theme library instead of being overwritten, and every Apply is snapshotted for restore
• Create, save, and manage your own presets; manage your theme library from the Advanced tab
• Extend styling with custom CSS
• Adaptive interface that scales from desktop down to narrow/mobile widths

Roadmap

Near-term

• Modernize the UI — ToolbarView, adaptive Breakpoint layout, boxed lists, SwitchRow/EntryRow (HIG polish ongoing)
• Track each new GNOME runtime release as it ships
• Verify every theming feature against the latest Libadwaita
• Clean up and modernize the codebase

Planned

• 85 ready-made themes built in, in a visual gallery with color previews
• Live preview with WCAG AA contrast warnings
• GNOME Shell theming, version-independent and applied live
• Recolored icon theme per preset, generated and applied from the app
• Firefox chrome theming, on top of firefox-gnome-theme
• Desktop pickers (GTK 3 theme, cursor, dark style, window buttons) — the start of the appearance control center, so GNOME Tweaks isn't needed
• Warn when a chosen GTK 3 theme is one Flatpak apps cannot resolve — the split that otherwise happens silently
• Never destroy an existing theme — Apply offers to import a foreign stylesheet into the theme library it now manages (Advanced tab)
• Next up — foregrounds chosen by measurement: pick the text color that actually reads on its own background, from the scheme's own palette, instead of trusting one mapping to suit every preset
• A palette editor: open a preset's color family and assign swatches to roles yourself, with contrast measured as you choose — the same measurement, shown while you pick
• Show your own presets in the visual gallery (built-in schemes done)
• Color wheel for picking colors
• Import GTK 3/4 themes from external sources (OpenDesktop, GitHub, and others)
• Light/dark preset pairs (deferred — shares one unresolved design question with the cycle below)
• Time-of-day theme cycle — rotate 2–4 presets across the day, on its own storage so it never overwrites your theme history (deferred)
• Preview with real widgets (see findings)
• Generate a preset from a single color
• Textures (carbon fibre, gloss, and more)

The full list, including inherited features and the theme engines, lives in ROADMAP.md.

Theming setup

Libadwaita applications

No setup is needed for native Libadwaita apps. For Flatpak apps, grant access to the GTK 4 config:

• Run sudo flatpak override --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-4.0, or
• Add xdg-config/gtk-4.0 under Filesystem → Other files in Flatseal.

GTK 3 applications

• Install the adw-gtk3 theme.

• For Flatpak apps, grant xdg-config/gtk-3.0 the same way as above.

• Install the Flatpak theme extension too — this one is easy to miss:

  flatpak install flathub org.gtk.Gtk3theme.adw-gtk3

  A Flatpak cannot see /usr/share/themes, so a distribution-packaged theme is invisible to sandboxed applications. Without the extension your host apps get adw-gtk3 and every Flatpak silently falls back to stock Adwaita — a desktop split along packaging lines, with no error to tell you why. If some of your apps look right and others don't, this is usually the reason.

  adw-gtk3 is not optional for GTK 3 theming, incidentally: GTK 3's built-in Adwaita has its colors compiled into its rules, so overriding color names cannot reach it at all. The measurements are here.

GNOME Shell

Install the User Themes extension, then use the Shell engine in the Theming tab. The Shell repaints on your running session — no logout.

What needs restarting

Short version: not your session.

Surface	To see a change
Panel, overview, app grid, Super+Tab, quick settings, notifications, lock screen	Nothing
A GTK or Libadwaita app	Reopen that app
X11 titlebars on apps that draw no decorations	Restart mutter-x11-frames

Named colors are read once, when an application starts — so the app you're looking at needs reopening, but the desktop around it does not.

Reverting

Open Preferences → Theming → Reset & Restore Presets and reset GTK 3 or Libadwaita.

Manual revert

rm -rf .config/gtk-4.0 .config/gtk-3.0
flatpak uninstall adw-gtk3
sudo flatpak override --reset

Note: flatpak override --reset clears all Flatpak overrides system-wide.

Building from source

Requirements: flatpak-builder, meson >= 0.59.0, and the GNOME 50 SDK and Platform runtime.

Flatpak (recommended):

git clone https://github.com/superuser-miguel/Vivid_Gradience.git
cd Vivid_Gradience
flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean builddir \
  build-aux/flatpak/io.github.superuser_miguel.VividGradience.Devel.json

Local build:

meson setup builddir --prefix=$HOME/.local
ninja -C builddir install

See HACKING.md for details.

A note on theming

Vivid Gradience is a tool for tinkerers and is not intended for distributions to ship by default. A unified Adwaita look matters for app developers; see stopthemingmy.app for the reasoning.

Acknowledgments

• Artyom Fomin and the Gradience Team — the original Gradience
• hydroxycarbamide — whose Gradience fork this project is based on
• superuser-miguel — reviving and modernizing the fork
• Weblate — translation platform