Nix Colors

What?

This repo is designed to help with Nix(OS) theming, exposing a nix attribute set with 204+ themes to be used as you wish. As well as a home-manager module you can import to globally set your scheme across your entire configuration. We also include two lib functions: one for generating a stylish nix wallpaper, and another for generating a colorscheme from any image!

It fills pretty much the same usecase of my project flavours (and uses it internally), but for your cool reproductible Nix configurations!

What is base16?

Base16 is a standard for defining palettes (schemes), and how each app should be themed (templates). For now we'll just hand you the schemes and let you handle how to use each color. I plan on delivering simple templates as modules soon(tm).

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Why?

Existing solutions?

Nix is amazing and lets people do stuff their way, but we are often missing a standardized way of doing something, so people end up with lots of different (often incompatible) solutions to the same problem. Probably buried inside their dotfiles or NUR repositories.

Theming is one of them. Based on rycee's, some of my experience with creating a base16 theming workflow, and a demand for a easy way to expose multiple schemes, i decided to create this.

Perhaps this could become a standard solution for a common problem.

Why not use base16 listings?

I absolutely love base16, but it's messy. The repos are very fragmented and make difficult to QA and aggregate all the schemes and templates. While i appreciate their work, more maintainers are needed to keep up with PRs and improvements, and base16's creator (and only one that can add more maintainers or move the repo to an org) has no github activity over the last two years.

This repo aims to help with that. By keeping all scheme definitions in one place, we can easily track additions and QA all added schemes, while weeding out low-quality ones.

We include most (if not all) of base16 schemes, including some PRs that are still waiting to be merged. Any contribution there should find its way here soon after.

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How?

Please keep in mind this repo is WIP and its interface is subject to change (probably won't, but no guarantees). I suggest you either use flakes for reproductibility or pin your fetchurl incantation.

TL;DR

The general idea is:

• Either add the repo to your flake inputs (and pass on nix-colors to your home config), or use fetchTarball to grab it on a legacy setup.
• Import the module nix-colors.homeConfigurationModule
• Set the option colorscheme to your preferred color scheme (such as nix-colors.colorSchemes.dracula)
• Use config.colorscheme.colors.base0X to refer to any of the 16 colors from anywhere!

Walkthrough

Importing

Flake

First add nix-colors to your flake inputs:

{
  inputs = {
    # ...
    nix-colors.url = "github:misterio77/nix-colors";
  };
}

Then, you need some way to pass this onwards to your home-manager configuration. You should use extraSpecialArgs for this (if you haven't done this before, feel free to ask for my help).

Once you do, you can access the color schemes with nix-colors.colorSchemes, and the home-manager module with nix-colors.homeManagerModule.

Legacy (non-flake)

If you're not using flakes, just go to the top of your configuration and add:

let nix-colors = builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/misterio77/nix-colors/archive/main.tar.gz";

Now you can access the color schemes with (import "${nix-colors}/schemes"), and the home-manager module with (import "${nix-colors}/module").

Using

With that done, move to your home manager configuration.

You should import the nix-colors.homeManagerModule (or (import "${nix-colors}/module")), and set the option colorscheme to your preferred scheme, such as nix-colors.colorSchemes.dracula (or (import "${nix-colors}/schemes").dracula)

Here's a quick example on how to use it with, say, a terminal emulator (kitty) and a browser (qutebrowser):

{ pkgs, config, nix-colors, ... }: {
  imports = [
    nix-colors.homeManagerModule
  ];

  colorscheme = nix-colors.colorSchemes.dracula;

  programs = let colorscheme = config.colorscheme; in {
    kitty = {
      enable = true;
      settings = {
        foreground = "#${colorscheme.colors.base05}";
        background = "#${colorscheme.colors.base00}";
        # There's a lot more than just fg and bg...
      };
    };
    qutebrowser = {
      enable = true;
      colors = {
        # Becomes either 'dark' or 'light', based on your colors!
        webppage.preferred_color_scheme = "${colorscheme.kind}";
        tabs.bar.bg = "#${colorscheme.colors.base00}";
        keyhint.fg = "#${colorscheme.colors.base05}";
        # A lot more...
      };
    };
  };
}

If you change colorscheme for anything else (say, nix-colors.colorSchemes.nord), both qutebrowser and kitty will match the new scheme! Awesome!

Tips and tricks

Custom scheme

Okay, we have 200+ themes, but maybe you want to hardcode your own, no problem! You can just specify it directly:

{
  colorscheme = {
    slug = "pasque";
    name = "Pasque";
    author = "Gabriel Fontes (https://github.com/Misterio77)";
    colors = {
      base00 = "271C3A";
      base01 = "100323";
      base02 = "3E2D5C";
      base03 = "5D5766";
      base04 = "BEBCBF";
      base05 = "DEDCDF";
      base06 = "EDEAEF";
      base07 = "BBAADD";
      base08 = "A92258";
      base09 = "918889";
      base0A = "804ead";
      base0B = "C6914B";
      base0C = "7263AA";
      base0D = "8E7DC6";
      base0E = "953B9D";
      base0F = "59325C";
    };
  };
}

Listing all schemes (and registry usage)

Maybe you're working on a cool graphical menu for choosing schemes? Or want to pick a random scheme when you press a button?

No problem with nix-colors! The fact that we expose all schemes means you can easily use nix eval to list schemes (or even grab and print out their colors), for all your scripting needs.

nix eval --raw nix-colors#colorSchemes --apply 's: builtins.concatStringsSep "\n" (builtins.attrNames s)'

This assumes you have nix-colors set as a nix registry. You can easily do it by passing nix-colors from your flake to your system configuration, and using:

{
  nix.registry.nix-colors.flake = nix-colors;
}

Generate a scheme from wallpaper

You can easily use a derivation to generate a scheme from anything, including a picture.

As it's a common usecase, we include a lib function to do just that. Simply call nix-colors.lib (passing your pkgs attribute), and it's at your disposal:

{ pkgs, config, nix-colors, ... }:

# This will bring colorschemeFromPicture into scope
with nix-colors.lib { inherit pkgs; };
{
  colorscheme = colorschemeFromPicture {
    path = ./wallpapers/example.png;
    kind = "light";
  };
}

All done, just use config.colorscheme as usual!

Generate a wallpaper from a scheme

Of course, you can go the other way around too. You can easily use your chosen colorscheme in any sort of derivations.

We include a lib function for generating a stylish nix-themed wallpaper matching your scheme. As above, call nix-colors.lib { inherit pkgs; }, and use the lib this way:

{ pkgs, config, nix-colors, ... }:

# This will bring nixWallpaperFromScheme into scope
with nix-colors.lib { inherit pkgs; };
{
  colorscheme = nix-colors.colorSchemes.tokyonight;

  wallpaper = nixWallpaperFromScheme {
    scheme = config.colorscheme;
    width = 1920;
    height = 1080;
    logoScale = 4.0;
  };
}

This assumes you have an option named wallpaper, of course. If so, you can then use config.wallpaper wherever you need to you use your wallpaper.

If you don't, just make wallpaper a let binding instead, or ust use nixWallpaperFromScheme directly where it'll be used.

Here's example usage for both this and scheme generation.

Thanks

Special thanks to rycee for most of this repo's inspiration, plus for the amazing home-manager.

Huge thanks for everyone involved with base16.

And extra special thanks for my folks at the NixOS Brasil Telegram group, for willing to try this out!

Roadmap

• Add support for base24 (which is backwards compatible with both base16 schemes and templates)
• Add modules for pre-configured application theming
• ???