How to make the title bar of neovim-qt dark when starting it out of a Distrobox on a system with a dark theme

21 June, 2026 - Categories: Linux - Tags: Neovim, Neovim-qt, GNOME, Plasma, Qt

By Steven Rosenberg

All the neovim GUIs, including Neovide and Neovim-qt seem to ship with a dark theme, but getting the title bar to go dark is handled by your system's desktop environment.

It all works fine in a Linux DE with a dark theme but gets a little more complicated when running a neovim GUI app out of a Distrobox.

The purpose of this tutorial is solely to change the color of the title bar in neovim-qt (aka nvim-qt) in a Distrobox. Themeing of the rest of the application is taken care of through neovim/neovim-qt's configuration.

Why am I even doing this? I hate seeing a white title bar in my dark-themed desktop, and while GNOME seems to theme QT apps very well (while in my experience KDE Plasma is not quite as good with GNOME apps, especially in Fedora Atomic distros).

I started with the Neovide Flatpak but then wanted to use neovim — both the console and GUI versions — in a Distrobox.

Both Debian and Fedora don't package neovide but do offer neovim-qt (start it with nvim-qt in the console).

I learned from the package dependencies that Debian builds neovim-qt with qt5 and Fedora does it with qt6, so to get the title bar to go dark, you need slightly different commands in Distroboxes that run those distros.

I configure my Distroboxes with custom home directories so the dotfiles and other config files (theoretically) don't mix with my "main" terminal and system, so I have a separate .bashrc to work with.

Depending on whether you are using Debian 13 (qt5) or Fedora 43 (qt6), the recipe is slightly different.

At the end of your .bashrc file in a Debian Distrobox, add:

export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct

At the end of your .bashrc file in a Fedora Distrobox, add:

export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt6ct

Log out and log in, and your title bar should go dark when you are using a dark theme.