An Omarchy (Quattro) shell plugin that switches between a light and a dark theme at sunrise and sunset, with a bar widget for choosing Light, Dark, or Auto and for picking which theme — and which of its backgrounds — each mode uses.
Applying a mode also retints Zed and the GTK/XDG colour scheme so the whole desktop moves together.
mwikala.auto-theme/
├── manifest.json plugin declaration
├── Widget.qml bar widget + popup panel
├── bin/omarchy-auto-theme engine: sun times, scheduling, theming
├── templates/zed.json.tpl Zed theme, rendered from the omarchy palette
└── systemd/
├── omarchy-auto-theme.service applies the theme and schedules the next run
└── omarchy-auto-theme.timer hourly safety net
Everything resolves relative to this directory. The QML finds the script via
Qt.resolvedUrl, the script finds its units via $SCRIPT_DIR, and the service
unit uses %h/.config/omarchy/plugins/mwikala.auto-theme/.
sunwait is not in the Arch repositories and there is no fallback for it — without
it every hour reads as night and the theme never leaves dark. Install it first:
yay -S sunwait
omarchy plugin add https://github.com/mwikala/omarchy-auto-theme.git --enableThen add the widget to the bar and click Auto in its panel, which links and starts the
timer. Update later with omarchy plugin update mwikala.auto-theme.
sunwaitfor sunrise/sunset times (AUR)omarchy-theme-setandomarchy-theme-color(ship with Omarchy)jq
~/.config/omarchy/auto-theme/config:
LIGHT_THEME="Flexoki Light"
DARK_THEME="Matte Black"
LIGHT_BACKGROUND="" # filename within the theme; empty lets omarchy cycle
DARK_BACKGROUND=""
LOCATION="" # "LAT LON"; empty auto-detects by IP and caches for 24hThe panel dropdowns write to this file.
Omarchy has no notion of a theme's default background: omarchy-theme-set
takes the image one past whatever the previous theme was showing, which never
matches, so it always lands on the theme's first file. Pinning a background
here makes a theme come up on the same image every time.
A pin is a filename, resolved against the same directories
omarchy-theme-bg-next searches — ~/.config/omarchy/backgrounds/<theme>/
first, then the theme's own backgrounds/. Cycling from a pinned image
therefore continues from it rather than jumping back to the first.
When a background is pinned, the theme is applied with
OMARCHY_THEME_SKIP_BACKGROUND=1 and the image set afterwards, so omarchy's
own choice never flashes on screen first. If the file has since disappeared
from the theme, it falls back to omarchy-theme-bg-next. Changing a slot's
theme clears its pin, since the filename belonged to the old theme.
Zed is themed from the palette rather than by naming a theme installed in the editor, so a new omarchy theme needs no counterpart looking up and installing.
templates/zed.json.tpl is a Zed theme with {{ key }} placeholders. Both
slots are rendered from their theme's colors.toml — resolved through
omarchy-theme-color --all, the same parser omarchy's own templates use — into
a single ~/.config/zed/themes/omarchy.json holding Omarchy Light and
Omarchy Dark. Applying a mode then only has to flip theme.mode, and Zed
picks the regenerated colours up without a restart.
Scopes follow omarchy's own vscode-theme.json.tpl and helix.toml.tpl rather
than a fresh set of guesses, so a file looks the same in Zed as it does in
Helix, neovim or VS Code under the same theme. Tags are yellow, punctuation and
delimiters recede to dark_foreground, and comments get a dim tone derived
from the palette's muted grey.
A palette's hues are chosen for a terminal, where one of them colours a prompt
rather than every tag in a file: Flexoki Light's yellow sits at 2.3:1 on its own
background. Three floors are therefore applied against the background, each by
blending toward the foreground — 4.5:1 for the hues, 3.5:1 for punctuation, 3:1
for comments, so the two recessive tones keep their order. Backgrounds and the
ANSI colorN keys are exempt: the first are meant to recede, and the last have
to keep matching the real terminal.
Blending toward the foreground rather than toward the next grey up is deliberate.
Everforest's dark_foreground is itself 1.7:1, so a blend toward it never
converges, and White and Vantablack order the two greys the opposite way round
to every other theme.
All 22 stock themes clear these floors. What the floors cannot fix is a palette
with fewer distinct hues than there are roles — Retro 82 resolves blue,
magenta and purple to one teal, and 11 of the 22 alias bright_blue to
blue, which merges operators into functions. Those collapses are in the
palette, and show up identically in omarchy's own VS Code and Helix themes.
The theme block in ~/.config/zed/settings.json is rewritten in place with
sed; it is JSONC and trailing commas would not survive a jq round trip.
VS Code, VSCodium and Cursor are left to omarchy-theme-set-vscode, which
already installs the theme a stock theme asks for and otherwise generates one
from colors.toml. Setting them here only fought with it.
The panel covers everything below, so the engine stays in the plugin rather than on
PATH. Put it there yourself if you want it:
ln -s ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/mwikala.auto-theme/bin/omarchy-auto-theme ~/.local/bin/omarchy-auto-theme status # location, mode, sun times, timer state
omarchy-auto-theme mode light # manual override, disables auto
omarchy-auto-theme enable # follow the sun
omarchy-auto-theme disable [mode] # stop following, optionally settle on a mode
omarchy-auto-theme config light "Catppuccin Latte"
omarchy-auto-theme config dark-bg "1-dark-waters.jpg" # "" to unpin
omarchy-auto-theme backgrounds dark # what that theme offers
omarchy-auto-theme panel-json # state consumed by the panelThe script pushes state after applying a change:
omarchy-shell -q mwikala.auto-theme refreshWidget.qml replaces Panel's built-in IPC handler (manageIpc: false) to
expose refresh alongside open/close/toggle — the base only provides the
latter, so without this the push is silently dropped and the panel falls back to
its 60s poll. Clicks also paint optimistically, so the control never lags.
MIT