Theme sync with daytime/system theme

[sbatial]

Is it currently planned to implement the possibility to automatically change the theme of the theme based on the time of the day or the system settings?
So that one could have a light theme at day and a dark theme at night.
Or is there some workaround I didn't find?

[kovidgoyal]

No plans. You can simply write your script to do it. kitty is fully scriptable. See the FAQ

[sbatial]

Ok, thank you. 👍

[magicznyleszek]

@BodeSpezial were you able to write the script? :)

[magicznyleszek]

For future archeologists - I have a script that is ok-ish (it went through several revisions, but is not as good as I would like it to be), so I will share it:

#!/bin/bash

dark_theme_name="Rosé Pine Moon"
light_theme_name="Rosé Pine Dawn"

function toggle_kitty_theme {
  # This either returns "Dark" or it doesn't exist (i.e. "Light")
  is_os_dark=$(defaults read -g AppleInterfaceStyle)

  theme_to_set="$light_theme_name"
  if [[ $is_os_dark = 'Dark' ]]; then
    theme_to_set="$dark_theme_name"
  fi

  if [[ $theme_to_set = $dark_theme_name ]]; then
    echo "Applying dark kitty theme…"
  else 
    echo "Applying light kitty theme…"
  fi

  # setting kitty theme and force reloading it
  kitty @ kitten themes --reload-in=all "$theme_to_set"
  for kittyid in $(ps -e | grep "[k]itty" | awk '{print $1}' | fmt); do
    kill -s USR1 $kittyid
  done
}

toggle_kitty_theme

It does work, but have some caveats:

1. Sometimes MacOS requires you to run this twice; I haven't come up with why it happens, it has something to do with the kittyid 🤷
2. You need to run it manually 👎

[ZuBB]

ps -e | grep "[k]itty"

pgrep kitty

[kovidgoyal]

You dont need to send USR1 to kitty at all, the themes kitten with --reload-all does that already.

[0rphee]

I used this https://github.com/bouk/dark-mode-notify

It does the job very well.

[gregorias]

Theme change based on OS settings is now possible since 0.38.

[olejorgenb]

In gnome 47.9 with Kitty 0.42.2 it does not work fully. It detected a change from light to dark in existing terminals, but not for dark to light.

[olejorgenb]

I suppose it has to do with the note here: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/themes/#change-color-themes-automatically-when-the-os-switches-between-light-and-dark

On the GNOME desktop, the desktop reports the color preference as no-preference when the “Dark style” is not enabled. So use no-preference-theme.auto.conf to select colors for light mode on GNOME. You can manually enable light style with gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme prefer-light in which case GNOME will report the color scheme as light and kitty will use light-theme.auto.conf.