The next Omarchy themes Qt apps through qtengine instead of GTK3
Qt apps stop borrowing their look from GTK3 and get a color scheme rendered straight from your Omarchy theme, icons included.
Image: omacom/omarchy PR #18325 (GitHub)
Qt apps on Omarchy are about to match your theme properly. Contributor outfoxxed merged a pull request on November 10, 2026 that switches Qt theming from the GTK3 platform theme to qtengine. It’s coming in the next version.
In the PR, outfoxxed explains that the switch “uses omarchy’s theme colors and reduces ram cost per process”. No memory figures are given, but the color part is easy to see: the PR includes two screenshots of themed Qt apps, and the author says they tested it on their own system across Qt apps, with themes that are “acceptable across all apps, and an improvement over defaults”.
The plumbing is simple. Hyprland now sets QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qtengine, and a new template, qtengine.colors.tpl, renders a KDE color scheme from the theme’s colors.toml every time you switch themes. According to Omarchy’s theming docs, content such as lists, text fields and editors sits on the theme’s background, while the window chrome around it uses dark_background. Theme authors who want full control can ship their own qtengine.colors instead.
Icons follow too. A new hidden command, omarchy-theme-set-qt, copies the theme’s icons.theme into qtengine’s config on each switch, falling back to Yaru-blue, the same default GTK gets. It only touches that one key, so the rest of ~/.config/qtengine/config.json stays yours.
The docs also describe live updates: the first Qt process to start watches the config and color scheme files and tells every Qt app to reload when they change. QWidget apps repaint with the new palette right away, while Qt Quick apps pick it up at their next launch.
One thing doesn’t change. File pickers still go through GTK via the XDG desktop portal, as outfoxxed notes in the PR, so Qt apps keep the GTK file chooser.
Existing installs get a migration that adds the qtengine package, seeds the default config only if you don’t already have one, and refreshes the current theme so the new color file gets rendered. The package itself, qtengine 0.2.4 split into separate Qt5 and Qt6 packages, was added to omarchy-pkgs the same day.
