You can make things look pretty decent by running some kind of a settings daemon so that apps that follow xsettings Do The Right Thing. Either run one from one

You can make things look pretty decent by running some kind of a settings daemon so that apps that follow xsettings Do The Right Thing. Either run one from one of the DEs, or find a thing called xsettingsd that's more standalone but a bit more painful to use. But I actually like it better since it puts the settings in a text file, and it doesn't also hijack shortcuts and the like (like gnome-settings-manager does).