If you are going to compile X-apps, you may try first to compile XED.
If it works, you may try to compile them all.

As far as themes, thanks for the recommendation, but I already made my own that I like quite a lot.

Ice-Breaker! It's very nice and soothing, but not all blacked out like the truly dark themes.

Do you really want to be busy with X-Apps?
You may need to compile a lot of dependencies.
This is what X-Apps are about.
The only X-App which is easy to compile is XED
_https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=xed-git

XED is very similar to Pluma. You may not need it.

Perhaps, you may better try a sort of WhiteSur (dark theme)
_https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme

As far as a menu icon, I use the simple menu in Mate, one icon that opens the menu, not the fancy ones.

For that icon, it's pretty simple, the icon is "start-here.png", and I just replace it in my chosen theme with one of my choosing. Don't know if that's helpful or not.

How many times now have I held mint artwork from cindy or debbie?

Also, when I'm using a mint theme, can I please have a mint icon for my menus that come with the panel and are not mintmenu/matemenu?

I am warming up quite a bit at the excalibur-deathmetal wall paper (insert jolly roger emoticon here). It's almost perfect, just needs a little tweaking IMO.

First time I saw it, I thought "yes YES Golinux! Come over to the darkside where it's nice and cool, we have cookies!"

LOL!

In similar news the creator of clearlooks-phenix seems to be back with an update.

https://github.com/jpfleury/clearlooks-phenix

I'm kinda excited by this. Mint, like Devuan, is doing some good works for the community and freedom of choice.

Gnome has some good and useful things about it, some nice apps, dang shame they developed a M$ attitude about it.

Would require someone to integrate it into Devuan though. Perhaps someone will step up to take it on . . .

Well above my skill level likely, but i'm going to give that project a little time to mature, then i'm going to start testing it on Devuan, i'll for sure post any results so maybe that will be helpful.

https://github.com/xapp-project/libadapta

Some Gnome apps in gtk3 include their own CSD, which tries to override your theme and use it's own color scheme for titlebars and it's own min-max-close buttons. Which looks fine, and by fine I mean bleh, in Gnome, but in any other DE it looks ridiculous with two sets of those buttons and other flaws with colors and such.

The one gtk4 app i've seen goes beyond that, it overrides your theme completely and you no longer even have your own titlebar.

nocsd is starting to fail, but this is a ray of sunshine.

Edited: for context and acronyms.