light/dark theme based on system?

[hanoii]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I normally use a dark setting systemwide, but also sometimes I am outdoors and prefer a light theme for most and I would like a light one on kitty.

Describe the solution you'd like
I'd like a setting to set a default theme, a light theme and and or a dark theme. You could have a setting to enable this but I assume it's redundant, if you only select a default theme, there would be no change, if there's a light/dark theme configured, it will favour that over the default depending on the system setting.

[kovidgoyal]

Not something I care enough to implement. It's trivially easy to
implement this yourself by using the themes kitten. Simply have your
system run a script when the theme changes and in that script call the
themes kitten to change the theme in all kitty instances.

[hanoii]

How didn't I think of that?!

Looking around it seems https://github.com/bouk/dark-mode-notify for osx is a kickstart I'll be trying out, if anyone stumbles upon something different/better let me know.

EDIT:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ "$DARKMODE" -eq 1 ]]; then
	kitty +kitten themes --reload-in=all Snazzy 
fi

if [[ "$DARKMODE" -eq 0 ]]; then
	kitty +kitten themes --reload-in=all Material
fi

does it :)

[Joxtacy]

@hanoii Did you manage to figure out a solution?
How often/when do you run your script to check the $DARKMODE variable?

The slightly annoying thing with this approach is all the separate moving parts to it.

[hanoii]

@Joxtacy yes, it was sorted out by what explained in the other post. I don't have to poll anything, that small program linked #4915 (comment) runs the script whenever the setting changes. It's just one tiny think on top of the thousands I manage :)

[rkshthrmsh]

Hi @hanoii, I was able to build and test dark-mode-notify with Kitty from command line, but for some reason I'm unable to get the Background Agent launchctl load -w to automatically listen, launch, and execute the command on system mode change. Any help is appreciated.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>ke.bou.dark-mode-notify</string>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <true/>
	<key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/tmp/dark-mode-notify-stderr.log</string>
    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/tmp/dark-mode-notify-stdout.log</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
       <string>/usr/local/bin/dark-mode-notify</string>
       <string>/Users/user/.config/kitty/system_based_theme.zsh</string>
    </array>
</dict>
</plist>

EDIT:
I had to modify the bash script from hanoii above to provide full path to kitty's binary. Like so:

#!/bin/zsh

if [[ "$DARKMODE" -eq 0 ]]; then
	/Applications/kitty.app/Contents/MacOS/kitty +kitten themes --reload-in=all Rosé Pine Dawn 
fi

if [[ "$DARKMODE" -eq 1 ]]; then
	/Applications/kitty.app/Contents/MacOS/kitty +kitten themes --reload-in=all Rosé Pine Moon
fi

Figured it out thanks to the error logs (which I was not using previously)

[gaheldev]

For people using Gnome, I made a script that does it: https://github.com/gaheldev/kitty-gnome-lightdark-mode-switcher
Probably easy to adapt to KDE too. It feels very hacky but works for me so far.

[jannis-baum]

I case anyone is interested: I made a script that lets you generate your own color-schemes (for Kitty, Vim, and other programs) that allow you to reload the colors entirely dynamically, i.e. the entire scrollback is adjusted and you never have to worry about reloading anything but kitty!

The repo also includes instructions for how to make Kitty automatically change the theme in sync with the macOS system dark/light mode.

See Chameleon.

[h-jia]

Toggle Theme.zip
I made an alfred workflow to do this. It changes your system themes and kitty's at the same time.

[iclanzan]

Curiously Kitty is already tracking changes to the system theme but all it does is print the string "system color theme changed: dark/light".

[kovidgoyal]

Nothing curious about it, the tracking is used to change the window decoration colors on GNOME Wayland.

And see kovidgoyal/kitty-fosshack2024#3