Well, there is a little "hack" in CSSU Qt, which allows applications to use GTK syles, without taking care what is the current theme, you may want to look at it: http://gitorious.org/community-ssu/q...f9c83f6668f4f9 this is an example of how it is used: http://gitorious.org/community-ssu/o...ton.cpp#line46 That way Qt uses whatever sapwood has decided to be current, theme changes are applied on-the-fly, you don't need to care where the current theme images are stored and what their names are, etc. And of course memory usage is reduced, as Qt does not load its owns set of images, but uses shared pixmaps (the same ones GTK uses) NFC if the above helps you, I am not much into QML, but for native QPushButton that works with no problems (check how osso-calculator in CSSU behaves when theme is changed). So you may want to create your own set of native GTK widgets (in the same way Qt does) and trick somehow GTK to give you the pixmaps so you can GL draw them (I suspect QML uses QGLWidget/QGraphicsWidget/QGraphicsScene). Though I may had written nonsense as well EDIT: Why do you need to know the current transitions.ini?