Rofi theme configuration not working. Ubuntu Xenial+i3wm

Question

I just installed Ubuntu Gnome 16 on my laptop and decided to have my working DE as i3wm. Everything is fine except for the configuration on rofi.

I tried, with putting config file in directory ~/.config/rofi/config with below theme

rofi.color-enabled: true
rofi.color-window: #393939, #393939, #268bd2
rofi.color-normal: #393939, #ffffff, #393939, #268bd2, #ffffff
rofi.color-active: #393939, #268bd2, #393939, #268bd2, #205171
rofi.color-urgent: #393939, #f3843d, #393939, #268bd2, #ffc39c

The rofi is running fine with i3, but just can't get its theme color changed.

Thanks

Solution 1

You should put all settings into the .Xresources file in Your home directory (This is the recommended way of configuring rofi).

From man page:

CONFIGURATION

There are currently three methods of setting configuration options (evaluated in order below):

• System configuration file (f.e. /etc/rofi.conf).

• Xresources: A method of storing key values in the Xserver. See here for more information. This is the recommended way of configuring rofi.

• Command-line options: Arguments passed to rofi.

You can always check man page for more info by issuing command man rofi.

After each change You need to re-login.

Solution 2

I had this problem on xUbuntu 16.04LTS and resolved it by uninstalling the rofi that was installed with apt install rofi. The ubuntu repo has the old version which doesn't have its own settings config.

Next I installed the latest stable release from https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rofi after installing all the dependencies that were listed in the docs. You can just try to install rofi from the downloaded deb package and the terminal will output what dependencies are missing. On my system that included:

sudo apt install build-essential libxkbcommon-x11-0 libxcb-ewmh2 libxcb-icccm4 libxcb-xrm0 libxcb-randr0 libxcb-xinerama0 libxcb-xkb1

Note that some of the dependencies will need to be downloaded from source like libxcb-xrm0

sudo dpkg -i Downloads/libxcb-xrm0_1.0-2_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i Downloads/rofi_1.3.1-2_amd64.deb

After the installation was complete, rofi started using my ~/.config/rofi/config and I did not have to logout and back in

Comments

[gzz]

this works, but is there a reason why having the configuration on ~/.config/rofi/config not working? Reason is I don't want the configurations of my application stored just anywhere for cleaning purposes and easier to maintain, if possible I want them have under ~/.config/ directory.

[Michal Przybylowicz]

You can always use symlink. Create .Xresources file inside ~/.config/ directory and make a .Xresources symlink inside home dir pointing to that file.

[Reuel Ribeiro]

Just a heads up: Since the time of this post, rofi has alternated its preferred way of storing settings. Now it recommends storing the configuration at XDG_USER_CONFIG_DIR/rofi/config which usually translates to ~/.config/rofi/config. You can type rofi -h to see which configuration file it is fetching.

[Hamid Rouhani]

I used launchpad.net/~jasonpleau/+archive/ubuntu/rofi on 16.04LTS and it works!