flavours 0.3.5

A manager/builder for Base16. Written in Rust🦀.

What

This is a CLI program that both builds and manages Base16 schemes and templates.

The base16 specification consists of both schemes (with 16 colors) and templates. There'll probably be templates for most applications you use, but you can easily make one for literally any app that supports any sort of color customization.

Once your configuration files are set, you can theme your entire desktop with just one command. No more hassle changing themes when you get bored. Why have one color if you can have all the colors?

I use it to theme kitty terminal, i3wm, rofi, polybar, gtk, discord and spotify. Here's how it looks in action:

How

Installation

Packages

• AUR Package for Arch (and derivatives): yay -S flavours

Let me know if you want to package flavours for your favorite distro.

Cargo

Just install cargo and run cargo install flavours (don't forget to include ~/.cargo/bin on your PATH).

Post-install

After installing, you should probably use flavours update all to grab all published schemes and templates from the base16 repos. If you want, you can manually tweak the templates, schemes or even the repo lists (everything's located in ~/.local/share/flavours on Linux).

Usage

You can use flavours and base16 templates to automatically inject schemes into any application config file that supports colors codes.

Setup

Choose a template for each app you want themed (or create your own).

On these config files, place a start and end comment to tell flavours where to replace lines (defaults are # Start flavours and # End flavours). These usually should be located where you set color options on your app configuration. If the specific app supports including colors from another file, or if the template provides the entire file, you can forgo the comments altogether and use the rewrite=true on flavours config.

For reference, here's a couple configuration files from my dots:

• zathura
• dunst
• polybar
• alacritty
• rofi (rewrite mode)

On flavours configuration (~/.config/flavours/config.toml on Linux):

• Create a [[item]] section for each app, each section can have the following entries:
  • Specify the file to write (required)
  • A template (required)
  • A subtemplate (for when the template has one other than "default")
  • A hook to execute (do keep in mind this currently doesn't go through your shell, so if you want to use bash syntax, do it like this: hook='bash -c "my cool && bash stuff"')
  • Whether to use rewrite mode (if you do, you don't need the start and end comments)
  • Or change the start and end lines (useful for config files which comments are not started with #)

Vóila. You're now ready to apply schemes.

Applying

flavours apply is the command you'll probably be using all the time. So it's built to be as useful as possible.

The syntax is flavours apply [PATTERN], where PATTERN can be a scheme name, multiple scheme name, a glob (such as *light) expression, or can be ommited. If more than one scheme is specified or matched, flavours will choose one randomly (flavours apply *light will pick one random scheme ending with light, and apply it).

You can, for instance:

• Specify a scheme: flavours apply pasque
• Specify multiple schemes: flavours apply pasque paraiso atlas
• Use glob: flavours apply "gruvbox*"
• Omit: flavours apply (is the same as running flavours apply "*")

Other commands

You can also use flavours current to see the last scheme you applied, flavours list to list all available schemes (-l or --lines to print each in one line, you can also use PATTERN like on apply to list only specific scheme(s)), flavours info to show info (including truecolor colored output, r or --raw to disable) about some scheme(s) (also using the PATTERN syntax).

Lastly, we have flavours generate, it can generate a scheme based on an image (usually your wallpaper), with the following syntax: flavours generate <dark/light> /path/to/image/file. By default, the scheme will be saved with the slug (the scheme name referenced in all other commands) generated (you can change it with -s or --slug, or output to stdout instead with --stdout).

In my setup, i use feh to apply wallpapers, and i can get the current wallpaper with the command cat .fehbg | tail -1 | cut -d "'" -f2.

So my flavours command to generate and apply a dark scheme matching my wallpaper would be:

flavours generate dark $(cat .fehbg | tail -1 | cut -d "'" -f2) && flavours apply generated

Which i include in the script i use to change my wallpapers randomly.

Why

Why use this instead of other base16 managers, or even pywal?

While these projects are great and certainly fit some people's workflow, they didn't quite fit mine.

I decided to do my own project because i wanted a simple CLI program that can easily integrate with rofi, polybar, and everything else in my workflow. The main feature is being able to quickly and easily use a curated list of schemes, on all your apps. It's also objectively faster than any other manager.

When

All features are implemented! I'm currently working on improving code quality and stabilizing the features, but everything should work as intended.

Thanks to:

• Functionality inspiration from Base16 Universal Manager.
• Logo inspiration from Starship prompt