shades

shades is a framework for changing the theme of everything in your terminal (and to some extent, beyond) in a synchronized way.

Introduction

Most people that spend a lot of time working in a UNIX terminal will eventually find themselves with at least two tools that are theme-able. At this point, shades can be introduced as essentially a multiplexer - you tell shades that you want dark mode, and shades tells all your individual tools.

A little demo of shades - this is toggling the theme in six separate components at once (neovim, neovim status line, tmux, alacritty, the wallpaper, and mac dark/light itself - which dark reader syncs over to Chrome):

Installation

Clone this repo, then:

go install

Usage

The main way you'll interact with shades day-to-day is by invoking it to change the theme.

shades dark   # or shades d
shades light  # or shades l
shades toggle # or shades t

However, for this to do anything, you'll need to set up the server and at least one client.

Step 1/3: setting up the server

For shades to work at all, it must be running in server mode (shades -s) in the background.

Step 2/3: setting up clients

While shades is designed to be used by developers and configured with code, batteries are included for many popular tools, including:

• alacritty
• bat (requires fish)
• fzf (requires fish)
• tmux
• bat
• btop
• macos dark/light theme
• macos wallpaper

You can run these built-in clients with the -c flag.

shades -c tmux alacritty fzf bat btop mac mac-wallpaper 

You can get a list of all available clients with the -l flag.

shades -l 

The shades.nvim plugin enables theming Neovim, and provides a second example of implementing a shades client. See more about implementing your own clients in the next section.

Step 3/3: daemonizing (optional but highly recommended)

You can experiment with shades by just running shades -s and shades -c ... in a terminal, but my recommendation is that you eventually daemonize both of these.

This repo provides a TUI to automate this called shades-daemonizer, but it only supports Macs/launchd at the moment. To install the TUI, open up the daemonizer directory and run go install. Then run with a simple shades-daemonizer - you can re-run as needed to edit the configuration of the daemon.

Configuration

shades is configured with a yaml file - an example can be found in this repo (shades.yaml). shades will look for this file in:

1. the path that SHADES_CONFIG is set to
2. if that's empty, $HOME/.config/shades/shades.yaml

Implementing your own clients

Because UNIX sockets are a widely supported transport technology, and the protocol we build on top of it is trivial to implement in any language, you can integrate just about anything you can control programmatically with this framework.

My recommendation is that you default to building these in Go with the same structure that the built in clients use. Basically, if you can fill out this method:

func (f FooClient) SetTheme(theme string) error {}

with code that themes the thing you want themed, then you should do that.

Protocol

shades uses a simple plain text protocol with 5 verb:noun messages:

1. subscribe:name - begin receiving set messages
2. unsubscribe: - stop receiving set messages
3. set:{theme} - can only be sent by the daemon, a client should re-theme based on the value of theme
4. propose:{theme} - this is a request from a client to change the theme, which is useful for giving things like neovim interactive control over the theme
5. get:{theme} - firing this will result in the server firing a set back, useful in the startup context

Each message is delimited by a \n character.

propose and get are optional; the simplest client just subscribes, waits for and acts open any set, and fires an unsubscribe on shutdown.

TODOs

• turn the neovim stuff into a proper plugin
• basic configuration - stuff like paths
• advanced behavioral configuraton
• launchd setup script - want it to be nice and interactive, and ideally not fish specific
• make clients poll server for a bit before giving up - right now if the server isn't up, the clients just immediately die, and it would be nice to just start both simultaneously.