Using GTK-Qt with XChat

GTK-Qt is a theming engine that allows GTK applications to have the window border and widgets to share the appearance of other Qt applications. Most users who use GTK-Qt are using the K Desktop Environment (KDE), which uses Qt as the widget toolkit (button and control appearance).

As XChat is a GTK+ application, the widgets would not match up with rest of KDE unless a Theme Engine like GTK-Qt or QtCurve is used.

Problem With XChat and GTK-Qt

When in Tree View mode for XChat, the Channel Names in the list should change color when new data has arrived since you last looked at a channel. There is a bug with certain versions of GTK-Qt while on Qt 3 where the channel name would not change when new data was received. This isn't a bug with XChat, but with GTK-Qt.

Fixing the problem

The simplest way to "fix" the problem in XChat is to disable GTK-Qt within KDE. This will allow the channel names to change colors, but will have the consequence of XChat not blending in with other applications.

This bug has been fixed in the GTK-Qt source, but hasn't been released by many distributions. So another option is to rebuild the GTK-Qt with updated libraries for Qt. It has been reported that building GTK-Qt while having Qt 4 developer libraries on the computer has fixed the problem.

This issue has not been reported while on KDE4, which is built with Qt 4. Users who previously had the problem on KDE3 were able to see channel names change color after they upgraded to KDE4.

Alternatively, you could use a different Theme Engine such as QtCurve which does not have the same bug.