Description of problem: I am trying to change the GTK Theme to something else than Adwaita on a icewm desktop. To do so I have tried gtk-chtheme and lxappearance which both worked in the path. No theme change seems to be applied.
Are we talking about gtk2 or gtk3 here?
I have only tested GTK2 applications, but I am going to try to set up another reproducer to see if it also affects GTK3.
Not necessary, it will not work anyway. lxappearance just writes values to ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/desktop.conf but doesn't apply them. For that you need an XSETTINGS manager, e.g, gnome-settings-manager or lxsession. Or you need something that directly writes to ~/.gtkrc for gtk2 (or ~/.gtkrc-2.0?) and ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini, but these changes are then only applied when an app is started.
Thanks for pointing that out, but the problem also occurs using gtk-chtheme which is writing to ~/.gtkrc-2.0 correctly. Besides that lxappearance is causing a segfault right now, but that might be another bug.
I have noticed that: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=953945 has already been reported on the lxappearance segfault. I am going to re-open this one and change the comp to gtk-chtheme.
After some additional debugging with the help of Christoph, I was able to figure out that gtk-chtheme does not write: gtk-theme-name="THEME_NAME" to .gtkrc-2.0. After adding it manually, the theme is adopted correctly. I am going to talk to the upstream developer of gtk-chtheme on that.