newl

newl is a Pywal theme manager which encourages the user to store and manually tweak their themes rather than simply passing an argument to the -i flag and calling it a day. It currently is mainly tested on X11 but is extensible enough that basic support for competent Wayland compositors should be trivial to add.

Proper integration with proper desktop environments is, for the most part, missing; I do not usually use a proper desktop environment so I cannot easily test it on one. Currently there only exists integration with icewm’s menu and an experimental script for setting the background in COSMIC.

If you’d like me to integrate support for your desktop environment, don’t be afraid to open an issue; I’ll happily see what I can do.

Features

• pick your theme from the command line, via dmenu, or graphically via [n]sxiv
• edit, update, or delete active theme with a single command
• set a random theme
• easily customise scope and mechanics of theme application via [{ba|z|k}]sh
• automatically generate icons for themes to aid integration with graphical applications
• store textual information about wallpapers. If you have wallpaper of a city, why not write a short bit about the city or the buildings in view?

Installation

Installation of shell scripts is trivial: simply place it in a directory in your $PATH.

Required dependencies

• dmenu
• Pywal16
• ImageMagick (for icon creation; newl’ll run without, but it’ll print a few errors)

Optional dependencies

Use of these programs is hardcoded into the source, but it’s trivial to remove them and replace them with whatever you find more suitable.

• emacs
• pywalfox
• dwm with the dwmc and xrdb patches

Usage

First, you’ll need a theme. Make one the normal way (wal -i <image>). Then, come up with a name for the theme, say, <theme>, and run newl n <theme>. Your theme should be created. Run newl l to verify. You can apply this theme at any time with newl a <theme>.

You’ll probably want to change which applications the theme gets applied to or how it gets applied to them. You have two ways of doing this:

• editing the update function in the source code
• create and edit the post-application script via newl p <theme> (make sure EDITOR is set)

For more information, try newl -h… or just read the source code.