Wallpapers and palettes

The palette comes out of the wallpaper. Pick a wallpaper and the shell takes one accent colour from it, builds a palette around that accent, and hands it to every program it reaches: the island and the widgets, the terminal and what runs in it, both editors, the GTK, Qt and KDE windows, Thunar, Zen and Vesktop. Pick one of the nine fixed palettes instead and the wallpaper stops deciding.

Try it here: pick a wallpaper or a palette and this site takes the same colours the desk would.

Catppuccin MochaCatppuccin LatteTokyo NightGruvbox DarkNordRosé PineCyberpunkBauhausCrimson Moon

Showing Pagoda Fuji Blossom

Surfaces

background

#12161f

surface

#20242d

surfaceHover

#30343f

border

#404453

Type

text

#eef2f7

textMuted

#94a1b2

Accent

accent

#2e509e

accentHover

#436bc4

accentText

#ffffff

Status

red

#f38ba8

green

#a6e3a1

yellow

#f9e2af

blue

#89b4fa

Three wallpapers, and the desk repainted after each one.

Changing the wallpaper

SUPER T opens appearance on the island. The wallpapers are a strip with the one in the middle drawn large: Left and Right slide it, Enter applies the one in the middle, and the panel stays open so you can try the next. The folder is read again every time the panel opens.

The wallpapers, on SUPER + T.

The palettes, on SUPER + SHIFT + T.

The same panel, or the same result, from elsewhere:

From	How
The island	SUPER T
The launcher	type > and pick Appearance
The control centre	click the Appearance block, which shows the wallpaper in use
Settings	Appearance → Theme → Theme and wallpaper → Open
Thunar	right-click a picture → Set as Wallpaper
A terminal	qs ipc call wallpaper set /path/to/picture.jpg

Thunar and the terminal take any picture on the disk, not only the ones in the wallpapers folder, and go through the shell the way the island does: the same transition, the same repaint.

A profile carries a wallpaper and a palette, so switching profile under Settings → System changes both. See Settings.

Transitions

The next wallpaper arrives over the last one with an effect, chosen under Settings → Appearance → Theme → Transition: Fade, Wipe, Wave, Circle, Outer, None or Random. Each tile plays its effect in miniature over two of your wallpapers. Wipe is the default, and Random picks one of the others, never None, every time a wallpaper is applied. The wallpaper is drawn by awww, and a transition takes one second.

Adding your own

Put the picture in ~/.local/share/wallpapers/ and open the appearance panel again. JPEG, PNG and WebP files are read (.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .webp); subfolders and hidden files are not. The name under the tile is the file name, with dashes and underscores turned into spaces.

setup never touches a file it did not put there, so your pictures stay through ./setup update and ./setup uninstall.

The forty that come with the desk are AI-generated images in an impasto style. The questions page says which file is which.

The forty that come with it.

How a palette is made

One accent, and a palette built around it. The picture is shrunk and reduced to 24 colours with ImageMagick, and the accent is the most saturated mid-tone among them. A picture with nothing in the middle range gets its most colourful swatch instead, and one with no colour at all gets a neutral blue.

Tokens	Where they come from
accent	the wallpaper
accentHover	the accent, lighter
accentText	black or white, whichever reads on the accent
background, surface, surfaceHover, border	near-black, tinted with a few per cent of the accent
text, textMuted	fixed greys
red, green, yellow, blue	fixed, so a status colour means the same under every wallpaper

Each program then takes what it needs, and a colour that carries text is made lighter or darker until it reads on that program’s own background, keeping its hue. The terminal, for one, sits on the accent at 22 % under every palette, so it stays dark even under Catppuccin Latte.

What does not follow

• The island is pure black under every palette. It is the shell’s identity, not a themed surface; the wallpaper shows in the accent on its rings and highlights.
• Warnings keep fixed colours. The battery ring and the timer ring step through the same hues whatever the wallpaper, so a colour always means the same reading.
• The login screen does not follow the palette: it runs before anybody has chosen one.
• Spotify takes a new palette at its next start, not while it plays. See Applications.

The nine palettes

SUPER SHIFT T opens the palettes, the page under the wallpapers in the same panel; Down and Up switch between the two. The first tile, Adaptive (Wallpaper), is the palette taken from the wallpaper, and it is the default. Any other tile keeps its palette whatever wallpaper you pick afterwards, until you go back to Adaptive.

Palette	Label	Accent	By
Catppuccin Mocha	Dark Pastel	#89b4fa	Catppuccin
Catppuccin Latte	Light Clean	#1e66f5	Catppuccin — the one light palette
Tokyo Night	Cyber City	#7aa2f7	Tokyo Night
Gruvbox Dark	Warm Retro	#d79921	Gruvbox
Nord	Arctic Frost	#88c0d0	Nord
Rosé Pine	Soho Dusk	#ebbcba	Rosé Pine
Cyberpunk	Neon Synth	#ff007f	impasto
Bauhaus	Modernist	#e52521	impasto
Crimson Moon	Vampiric	#e63946	impasto

Six are other people’s work, carried as they are; the last three are the shell’s own. Credits links each project.

What the push reaches

Every palette change is pushed to the programs around the shell. Some repaint where they stand; others take it the next time they open a window.

Program	Takes the new palette
The island, the bar, the widgets, the dock, the notes, the pets	at once
The pointer, when its colour is Palette (Settings → Input)	at once, once the vector cursor is built
kitty and the prompt	every open terminal, at once
The greeting’s scenes	redrawn in the background, a few seconds later
cava, neovim	running ones repaint
btop, yazi, imv	the next one started
GTK windows, Thunar and its folders, Qt and KDE windows	the next window started
Zen, VSCodium	the next window
Vesktop	at once
Spotify	its next start
The login screen	never

The terminalkitty, the prompt, the greeting, and btop, cava, yazi and neovim inside it.

ApplicationsGTK, Qt and KDE, Thunar, Zen, Vesktop, Spotify, VSCodium and imv.