Auto Theme

Light at sunrise. Dark at sunset. Your choice in between.

A native Omarchy Quattro bar plugin for light/dark themes, backgrounds, and independent night light scheduling.

• Light / Dark / Auto — switch manually or follow the sun.
• Night light — On / Off / Auto, with a saved warmth setting from 2500–5500K.
• Your pair — choose a theme and background for each mode, side by side.
• Native controls — theme-aware colours, keyboard navigation, and reduced-motion support.

Install

Requires Omarchy Quattro with its Quickshell-based shell. Classic Waybar-based Omarchy is not supported.

yay -S sunwait
omarchy plugin add https://github.com/mwikala/omarchy-auto-theme.git --enable

Add Auto Theme to your bar through Omarchy's bar settings. Location is found automatically; there is nothing to set up.

sunwait is an AUR dependency. Other runtime dependencies are Bash, GNU coreutils, findutils, awk, grep, jq, curl, util-linux (flock), systemd user services, and Omarchy's theme/shell commands. Night light uses Omarchy's hyprsunset. Explicit clipboard paste uses wl-paste from wl-clipboard, normally provided by Omarchy.

omarchy plugin update mwikala.auto-theme

Using the panel

The header shows the current mode and the next sunrise or sunset. Hover the time to see which location it uses; click it to switch between Automatic and Manual. Theme Auto and night light Auto are independent; either can keep the scheduler running.

Drag the warmth slider right for warmer colours. The readout ranges from Subtle to Candlelight; click or middle-click it to switch to Kelvin. Release to save. When night light is inactive, the display returns to neutral and uses the saved warmth at its next activation.

Middle-click or double-click the slider to reset to Warm (4000K). With the slider focused, Delete or Backspace does the same. Arrow keys adjust warmth.

Expand Themes to change either theme/background pair. Default lets Omarchy choose the background; choosing a filename pins that image. Changing a theme clears its old background pin. Hover a picker to read a truncated name.

Tab moves between controls; Enter/Space activates them; arrow keys adjust warmth or navigate an open picker. Escape closes a picker first, then the panel.

Omarchy's own night-light toggle uses its stock 4000K. This plugin's controls and schedule use your saved temperature.

Location and privacy

Location is automatic by default: the plugin asks https://ipinfo.io/json for the approximate location of your internet connection, then shows the nearest town in the panel. The lookup is cached for 24 hours, failures are retried at most hourly, and the last known location is kept while offline. It works the same on Ethernet and Wi-Fi.

A VPN or some mobile networks can put that estimate somewhere else. Choose Manual and search for your town or city instead; suggestions come from the Open-Meteo geocoding API (location data from GeoNames), which receives only what you type. Pasting coordinates (51.51, -0.13) also works. Once saved, a manual location is never sent anywhere. Switch back to Automatic at any time.

City search uses Open-Meteo's free non-commercial API, subject to its terms and rate limits. The provider also sees your connection's IP address. Search requests are debounced; no API key is needed for personal use.

The city-search field exists only while explicitly editing. Saving, cancelling, closing the panel, or switching to Automatic destroys it. It remains read-only at the Qt level even while focused: bounded key-event edits avoid native clipboard checks. Ctrl+V, Shift+Insert, and middle-click request an asynchronous paste through an isolated helper, capped at 512 raw bytes and 128 characters, with a two-second deadline (plus one second to force termination) and 128 MiB address-space limit. No clipboard text is requested merely by opening or focusing the controls. Ordinary Unicode keyboard events are supported; IME composition is not. Paste composed text explicitly instead. To change a saved city, click Manual again.

IP and geocoding responses are capped at 32 KiB before entering the shell UI. Requests are HTTPS-only, ignore curl configuration, and have a five-second outer deadline (plus one second to force termination). City results are limited to five validated entries, with display strings no longer than 128 characters.

The plugin stores configuration in ~/.config/omarchy/auto-theme/config and runtime state, including cached coordinates, under ${XDG_STATE_HOME:-~/.local/state}/omarchy/auto-theme/. The config resembles shell assignments but is read as data, never executed.

Scheduling

Automation creates user-level systemd timers: an hourly recovery check and a one-shot timer for the next sunrise or sunset. Boundaries run one minute after the reported sun time to avoid rounding disagreements. Polar days/nights keep the current solar phase and retry when another boundary becomes available.

The hourly check catches a missed transition after sleep. Manual theme changes made outside the plugin are preserved until the next solar phase change.

Application themes

Theme changes use Omarchy's built-in theme support, including supported apps such as Zed. The plugin does not generate custom Zed palettes or edit its settings. Existing personal Zed theme files are retained when upgrading.

CLI

The engine lives inside the plugin; it need not be on PATH.

engine=~/.config/omarchy/plugins/mwikala.auto-theme/bin/omarchy-auto-theme

"$engine" status
"$engine" mode light
"$engine" enable
"$engine" disable
"$engine" nightlight auto
"$engine" temperature 3600
"$engine" temperature-display kelvin
"$engine" location auto
"$engine" location "51.5074 -0.1278" London
"$engine" location off
"$engine" config light "Flexoki Light"
"$engine" config dark-bg "1-dark-waters.jpg"
"$engine" backgrounds dark

Remove

Clean up the scheduler before removing the plugin directory:

~/.config/omarchy/plugins/mwikala.auto-theme/bin/omarchy-auto-theme uninstall
omarchy plugin remove mwikala.auto-theme

Uninstall stops automation and removes its user-service links. Your selected desktop theme remains in place. Configuration is retained for a later install. Use uninstall --purge instead to also remove plugin configuration and runtime state. Existing personal Zed themes and settings are retained.

Hiding or disabling a bar widget is not an uninstall. Run the engine's uninstall command first if you want to stop all automation.

Development checks

tests/run
tests/ui-run
tests/io-run
omarchy plugin validate .

Backend tests isolate state and mock external commands and network requests. UI checks run offscreen through Quickshell without changing your desktop.

An optional native Qt clipboard regression requires a C++ compiler, Qt development headers, and pkg-config. It uses an in-process test clipboard in an offscreen application, not your desktop clipboard:

tests/clipboard-run

The native check loads the actual Entry.qml, keeps it focused while simulating typing, undo, selection, and paste shortcuts, and asserts zero native clipboard reads. See SECURITY.md for the review scope and residual risks.

License

MIT — Mwikala Kangwa.