Kitty Theme Changer

Change Kitty Terminal Themes Easily!

Kitty Theme Changer provides simple CLI script that will help you test out and change theme configuration files for the Kitty Terminal Emulator.

Table of Contents:

1. Installation
2. Configuration
3. Tips and Tricks
   1. First Run
   2. Kitty Configuration Tips

For more information on the terminal visit: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty

The Kitty Theme Changer script has been tested with the collection of themes found in the kitty-themes repository: https://github.com/dexpota/kitty-themes

Installation

The recommended method for installing the Kitty Theme Changer is to use pip to install the package into your python environment. This can be done safely inside a python virtual environment or using the --user flag on pip install to install the script in your home directory.

Home directory install:

pip install --user git+git://github.com/fretboardfreak/kitty-theme-changer.git@master

Note that you can install the Kitty Theme Changer into the system's core python installation but I feel that python package management is a bit cleaner if user installed packages are kept out of the system directories.

Inside a Python Virtual Environment:

python -m venv my_python_env
my_python_env/bin/pip install git+git://github.com/fretboardfreak/kitty-theme-changer.git@master

As an alternative you could clone this repository and execute the script directly. This method would not leverage the setuptools entrypoint and would depend on you ensuring that the script is available in your PATH variable yourself.

Configuration

1. First step in configuring the Kitty Theme Changer is to download a set of themes for kitty (recommendation: https://github.com/dexpota/kitty-themes).

2. Second step is to configure kitty to include a theme config file. To do this add the line include ./theme.conf in your kitty.conf file.

3. Third and final step is to create the Kitty Theme Changer config file which will point to the correct paths for the themes you've collected.

   The Kitty theme changer uses a simple python module as a configuration file. By default this is '~/.kittythemechanger.py'. The list of required variables and their types are:

   • theme_dir (pathlib.Path): Directory of Kitty theme.conf files.
   • conf_dir (pathlib.Path): Directory Kitty looks in for theme.conf
   • theme_link (pathlib.Path): Symlink file Kitty loads from kitty.conf
   • light_theme_link (pathlib.Path): Symlink to a 'light' theme config file.
   • dark_theme_link (pathlib.Path): Symlink to a 'dark' theme config file.
   • socket (str): a Kitty compatible socket string for the '--listen-on' flag. See 'man kitty'.

   An example .kittythemechanger.py file is shown below:

   '''A config module for the Kitty Theme Changer Tool.'''
   from pathlib import Path
   from os import getpid
   from psutil import process_iter
   
   theme_dir = Path('~/kitty-themes/themes').expanduser()
   conf_dir = Path('~/.config/kitty').expanduser()
   theme_link = conf_dir.joinpath('theme.conf')
   light_theme_link = conf_dir.joinpath('light-theme.conf')
   dark_theme_link = conf_dir.joinpath('dark-theme.conf')
   
   def kitty_pid():
     ps = {x.pid: x for x in psutil.process_iter(['name', 'pid', 'ppid'])}
     cp = ps[getpid()]
     while cp.name() != 'kitty':
        cp = cp.parent()
     return cp.pid
   
   socket = 'unix:/tmp/kitty-socket-{}'.format(kitty_pid())
   

Tips and Tricks

First Run

On the first run the Kitty Theme Changer script will randomly choose a theme to set as both the light and dark theme. It does this to create the 3 symlinks in the kitty configuration directory pointed to by the config file. One pointing to a light theme, one pointing to a dark theme and a third that ties the kitty configuration with one of the light or dark links. (kitty.conf -> theme.conf -> light-theme.conf -> actual theme file). You can prevent a random theme from being chosen by creating the light and dark symlink files manually (the file names are set in your Kitty Theme Changer configuration file.) or you can simply set your themes to your preference after the first run.

Kitty Configuration Tips

• Kitty Terminal Emulator Site: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/index.html
• Kitty Terminal Configuration Docs: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf.html

The main features of the Kitty Theme Changer tool - listing themes, setting a dark or light theme, toggling between configured themes - can be used without any additional tweaks to the Kitty Terminal config.

However, the "--test" and "--live" features require some settings in order to work correctly.

• Kitty Remote Control: The remote control feature must be turned on. Either with a value of "yes" or a value of "socket-only" to limit remote control commands to only use the socket specified in the "--listen-on" flag when running kitty.

  allow_remote_control yes
  

• Kitty Socket: Any launchers or aliases that you use to start kitty should include a "--listen-on" option. The socket string that you choose for the "--listen-on" flag should match the socket string in your Kitty Theme Changer configuration file. You can also use "listen_on unix:/tmp/kitty-socket" in kitty.conf

• Single Instance/Instance Groups: For the "--live" feature to change the color theme for all running windows it is useful to run kitty with the --single-instance option turned on.

  If you want the Kitty Theme Changer to modify only a set of kitty windows then you can make all those windows part of the same Kitty instance using the --instance-group GROUPNAME flag.