Theming (Stylix)

The problem

A consistent look across a desktop means keeping colours in sync across the compositor, terminals, editors, GTK/Qt, and every applet. Maintaining those palettes by hand guarantees they drift.

The solution

Theming is centralised through Stylix using a single base16 palette. Every surface derives its colours from config.lib.stylix.colors rather than hard-coding hex values.

The shared theme is defined once in hosts/common/shared-variables.nix:

baseTheme = {
  scheme = "gruvbox-dark";
  wallpaper = ../../assets/wallpapers/amdgruvorange.png;
  cursor = { name = "Bibata-Modern-Classic"; size = 16; };
  font = {
    mono = "Adwaita Mono";
    sans = "Noto Sans";
    serif = "Noto Serif";
  };
  opacity = { desktop = 1.0; terminal = 1.0; popups = 1.0; };
};

What derives from the palette

Surfaces that cannot consume Stylix automatically are wired to it explicitly:

• GNOME Terminal and Zellij — colours generated from config.lib.stylix.colors.
• COSMIC — a full RON palette (all 30 fields) is written from the same source, so the COSMIC desktop matches everything else.

Because they all read one palette, changing scheme re-themes the entire stack in a single rebuild.

nix-colors removed

An earlier setup used a standalone nix-colors input. It was removed in favour of deriving everything from Stylix directly — one source of truth, one dependency fewer.

Opacity

Terminal and popup opacity are pinned to 1.0. Transparency was disabled deliberately: it caused rendering issues under COSMIC/GTK. The structure is kept so it can be re-enabled per host if a future desktop handles it cleanly.

Per-host wallpaper

The base theme carries a single wallpaper. Hosts may override it in their variables.nix; the mechanism is intentionally minimal because the rest of the palette is shared.