material-linux-theme

Auto-generated set of consistent themes for a Linux desktop based on the Android Material color palette. The goal is to easily generate matching themes for all the apps in your Linux desktop. Currently only a dark theme is provided.

The theme generator depends on the python-256 package.

Themes for the following apps are available at this point:

• KDE 5 and Plasma 5
• GTK 2
• GTK 3
• i3 Window Manager
• Emacs
• Midnight Commander
• XTerm

Installation

The themes in this repository are already generated and can be found in the out folder. If you wish to re-generate them after making some changes, just run generate-themes. It is not a necessary step to use the themes though.

To start using a theme, you can manually copy/edit the generated theme config files of the relevant applications from the out/<theme_name> folder. However, for convenience, there is also an automatic installer which will patch the appropriate config files. To run the installer, run: install-themes.

Note! The installation script has only been tested on some Ubuntu versions, and for what I know might eat all your data (although it shouldn't). Use at your own risk, and please report any problems.

The installer will add/edit:

• KDE theme files in ~/.local/share/plasma/desktoptheme/material-breeze and .local/share/color-schemes/Material.colors as well as Plasma theme configuration in ~/.config/plasmarc. Note that you need to select the Material color scheme manually in your KDE System Settings after the installation.
• GTK2 configuration/theme file ~/.gtkrc
• GTK3 configuration/theme file ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
• Midnight Commander config files ~/.mc/ini and ~/.mc/skins/material.ini or ~/.config/mc/ini and ~/.config/mc/skins/material.ini depending on the version of MC you are using.
• i3 Window Manager config file ~/.i3/config
• Emacs theme files in ~/.emacs.d/themes. Note that you need to manually setup the theme in your Emacs configuration. The installer will print ELisp commands that you should add to your personal Emacs initialization files.
• Xresources by merging in the contents of ~/.Xresources-xterm-colors using xrdb

Design

                                  +--------------------------------+
                                  |     for specific use-cases     |
                                  |                               \|/
raw_colors --> color_names --> palette --> common_theme --> [app_theme]+

<          Fixed         >     <   Defines the Theme  >     <  Fixed  >

• raw_colors - Raw color values
• color_names - Human-friendly color names of the Material color palette
• palette - Selects a subset of colors used in the theme
• common_theme - Assigns palette colors to common use-cases, provides unified look across all the applications
• app_theme - Multiple application specific themes that assigns colors to application-specific UI elements

Palette

The palette consists of the following entries:

• bg - background color
• fg - foreground color (mostly text)
• primary - primary UI element color
• secondary - secondary UI element color
• accent1 - first accent color
• accent2 - second accent color
• success, warning, error - colors associated with states
• semantic1 - semantic11 - colors used to indicate various semantics, e.g. for syntax highlighting or file type indication in file managers
• ANSI colors, e.g. red, light-red, dark-red - colors assigned to ANSI color names for all use-cases requiring a specific color (e.g. in a terminal)

Most colors in the palette can have 3 variants:

• normal - nominal color
• weak - providing lower contrast on the background (e.g. darker variant in dark theme and lighter variant in light theme)
• strong - providing higher contrast on the background (e.g. lighter variant in dark theme and darker variant in light theme)