Customizing instantOS

instantOS has an "it just works" philosophy so it shouldn't be necessary to change large parts of it. It is recommended to learn the default keybindings and how to use the OS with the default setup before changing it.

The dotfiles and thus most aspects of customization are managed by ins dot (see dotfiles management for more information). The beauty of ins dot is that you do not have to think about it, and you can just edit any dotfile you like or bring your own, and ins dot will take care not to overwrite your changes, while continuing to update dotfiles which have not been customized by the user.

Settings manager

There is a TUI settings managerm, which allows changing most of the standard settings similar to how Gnome, MacOS or Windows do it. These should be pretty self explanatory, they include thins like wifi, wallpaper, audio, keyboard layout, mouse sensitivity and more.

The control panel can be opened by super+left clicking on the status text, with super+ctrl+c, from the start menu or by typing ins settings in the terminal.

Use it in your own setup

Put the following in your window manager or wayland compositor autostart, and ins settings will work on your setup too.

ins autostart

You might also use ins settings apply to manually apply the settings, in case you do not want to run a background job.

Theming

Overall

Most applications on instantOS have built-in theming support which is documented elsewhere. This includes but is not limited to the following

• instantMENU
• instantWM
• Kitty
• Sway
• Hyprland
• Dunst
• Fuzzel
• Rofi

Theme away, instantOS will stop updating the dotfiles for any file you change. ins dot reset <filename> can be used to reset any dotfile to the default.

Gtk

There is a GTK theme section in the Appearance tab of the settings panel. On X11, changing this might require restarting GTK applications for this to take effect.

INFO

Keep in mind that modern GTK does not like to be themed, developers do not intend their applications to be themed. Modern GTK theming is pretty much a hacky workaround, and any distro shipping with that out of the box either has the resources of Ubuntu or is willing to break things. Theming GTK3 and 2 is mostly fine however.

Qt

There be dragons with customizing Qt. It is really easy to break Qt and end up with light theme icons on a dark theme or vice versa. The way to unbreak it is incredibly poorly documented, which is why currently the only option for Qt is to undo whatever you did to it, should you inevitably break it.

Do it manually, and tell me if you found a good way to theme it without breaking any applications.