I figured it out. I’m using the gtk theme as a base and it was getting things from there. I installed the Nordic-Polar gtk theme and now all good.
One thing idk if I can fix without hacking some things is that I added a border to the wibar to make it look like it’s gapped, but now theres a double gap between the bar and the rest of the windows.
does that theme pull colors etc from your installed gtk theme?
It appears to be pulling from gtk3 theme and falling back to xrdb colors. It was one of 4 included themes that came with Awesome (on Arch at least).
I’m realizing that using the same theme for multiple applications and desktop might be a mistake. Especially with tiling plus multiple tmux panels, everything starts to blend together. I might switch gtk/awesome to dracula and let the terminal stay in nord. Also, IIRC dracula also has an icon pack which nord does not.
Oh ok, iirc there was 4 themes that came with Awesome when I installed it from Ubuntu repo. I didn’t like the idea of using gtk based theme on awesome since I wanted to be able to use the same theme on multiple devices and different distros. It’s very likely I will have different gtk themes on different devices so I don’t want it to mess with my Awesome config. 
I am adding the themes as submodules in my dot file repo, so they will follow me around.
Thing that I like about awesome is you can keep the actual theme in separate file, and then just make multiple themes for yourself if you want to switch between multiple themes.
But I can also understand that some want to keep all config information in one single file.
Looks like I’m going with the gtk3 version of pcmanfm for gui file manager and trying nnn for cli file manager although may switch to ranger. Also, I’m liking sxiv better than feh for image previews.
It’s starting to come together…
If you have problems with image previews in ranger, try using Überzug as image renderer. Common option is w3m and I just recently found out that some of the problems I had with images were caused by w3m, not terminal emulator.
After I started using Überzug basically every problem I had with terminal image previews disappeared.
I wrote short post about this to my blog: Even's DIY ‘n stuff blog
What made pick this? Just curious. I haven’t managed to find enough differences in gui file managers to prefer one over the other. Currently I like to use thunar. Nautilus is also ok but I think it need a lot of gnome dependencies to work, which might be problematic in non-gnome system. 
Only reason I’m trying nnn over ranger initially is because nnn is supposed to be leaner. Good to know aobut uberzug though.
Thunar was my second choice, but it’s still bringing in some xfce stuff. There’s also a “set as wallpaper” option in the right click menu that will never work in awesome (I assume). I’d rather have something that’s as divorced from a specific DE as possible. The qt version of pcmanfm is the lxqt file manager, but afaict the gtk3 version in arch is entirely DE-agnostic (besides being gtk obv). Nvm, pcmanfm is default fm for all LXDEs (gtk2, gtk3 and qt).
What’s really frustrating me now is deciding on a remote desktop application. krdc is definitely the best in my experience, but I really don’t want to have to pull qt and all the other kde dependencies just for one application. Remmina pulls a bunch of gnome stuff I’d rather not have and I’m having trouble installing the vnc and rdp plugins anyway.
vinagre actually looks good despite being a gnome application, but seems kind of abandoned by the devs and won’t connect to Macs with passwords longer than 8 characters. If you want to pull your hair out, you can read several people pleading for a fix to this, including submitting patches just to be ignored by the devs.
It’s real shame when promising projects end up like this. One certain forum software comes to mind… 
Is there a reason why you are avoiding kde/gnome dependencies? Do they cause some problems for you with other programs?
I want to minimize bloat and broken functionality. Like in Thunar, “Set as wallpaper” doesn’t work because I’m not using XFCE. There are similar things in Nautilus. For KDE apps, I mainly want to avoid having to deal with settings across both GTK3 and QT. KDE is so gui-centric with it’s config, I honestly have no idea how to apply a theme via conf files only.
That said, my frustration with some gnome apps is fixed with this:
And I got RDP and VNC working in Remmina, so it’s not so bad. The only thing it’s sort of forcing me into is Gnome Keyring, which is fine.
So a little problem that I managed to fix with Awesome. I’ve been using tenkeyless keyboards since 2013 or 2014, but lately I got a used IBM model M keyboard, and noticed for some reason after booting the computer numpad was not working, even though Num Lock led was on. I’ve heard that some window managers don’t always know what to do with Lock keys, so I thought maybe there’s a solution for this.
And yes there is indeed. I solved the issue with X and program called numlockx. What you need to do is install this program, probably available in official repositories of your preferred distro, and then add line numlockx & to your xinit, before the exec line. Example bellow stolen from Arch wiki
#!/bin/sh
#
# ~/.xinitrc
#
# Executed by startx (run your window manager from here)
#
numlockx &
exec window_manager