UI customizing

The UI can be customized in two different ways:

1. By means of the internal colour dialog. This is a very simple and user-friendly way, the changes are immediately visible. Many of the colours of the MusE-speficic UI elements can be customized that way.
2. By means of external style sheets. This is generic Qt framework functionality, based on the CSS standard. It's suitable for generic customizing of Qt widgets. See Qt style sheets for more information.

Internal colors

The colours can be changed in Settings->Appearance...->Colors. The colours are saved in the theme-specific .cfc file in the user home folder.

There is a colour definition file for each theme delivered by MusE (e.g. .../themes/Dark Flat.cfc). Starting with MusE 3.1, a user-specific file (e.g. ~/.../themes/Dark Flat.cfc) is saved in the home folder when the theme is switched (so the current theme-specific colours are not lost any more), and reloaded when switching back to this theme.

There are also functions to save and load the colour definition files manually.

Style sheets

Similarly, there is a style sheet for each theme bundled with MusE, which is loaded when a theme is switched (e.g. .../themes/Dark Flat.qss). It can be overridden by a file of the same name in the home folder (e.g. ~/.../themes/Dark Flat.qss). There is also an option (in Settings->Appearance...->Themes) to "cascade" both these files (if both exist), i.e. the files are merged and if identical rules are detected in both, the user-specific rule overrides the global one. This makes it easy to use the global rules as a basis and selectively change only some of them in the user style sheet.

Icons

As of MusE 4.0, there is a possibility to override the bundled SVG icons (theme-specific). For that to work, create a folder with the theme name in your ~/.../themes/ directory (e.g. "Dark Flat") and put your own icons in there under the same name as the original icons.

User themes

As of MusE 4.01, custom user themes are supported. The corresponding .qss file can be copied into the ~/.../themes/ folder. It will then be displayed in the normal theme selection under Appearance->Themes.