Basix

An over-engineered, reusable Nix flake for all Base16 and Base24 themes from @tinted-theming/schemes, exposed as one convenient schema collection, library and opinionated theme packages for GTK and QT theming systems.

How does it work?

For some obscure reason, ¹ all schemes provided by tinted-theming are YAML files vendored in one massive repository. Basix, in turn, fetches the theme data from the tinted-theming repository and converts them into JSON to ensure the schemes are available in a format Nix can read, parse and expose under the flake outputs.

Downloading and parsing is done by a quick and dirty Python script and then exposed by the flake as schemeData. You can also import the Nix2 endpoint provided by default.nix and get schemeData that way.

How do I use this?

Basix can be used as a flake input, or imported from a tarball. To get a color scheme, import either schemeData.base16 or schemeData.base24 from the outputs from this flake to import the color schemes for yourself. For example, in the Nix REPL:

nix-repl> :p schemeData.base16.decaf
{
  author = "Alex Mirrington (https://github.com/alexmirrington)";
  name = "Decaf";
  palette = {
    base00 = "2d2d2d";
    base01 = "393939";
    base02 = "515151";
    base03 = "777777";
    base04 = "b4b7b4";
    base05 = "cccccc";
    base06 = "e0e0e0";
    base07 = "ffffff";
    base08 = "ff7f7b";
    base09 = "ffbf70";
    base0A = "ffd67c";
    base0B = "beda78";
    base0C = "bed6ff";
    base0D = "90bee1";
    base0E = "efb3f7";
    base0F = "ff93b3";
  };
  system = "base16";
  variant = "dark";
}

You can get a list of schemes by looking into json/ for the appropriate theming model or evaluate available themes in the Nix REPL using attrNames or similar.

Generated theme packages

Basix also generates "conservative" GTK/Qt themes for every Base16/Base24 scheme:

• themePackages.<system>.base16.<slug>
• themePackages.<system>.base24.<slug>
• packages.<system>.themes-base16
• packages.<system>.themes-base24
• packages.<system>.themes-all

You can build them if you so wish:

# Build all packages
$ nix build .#themes-all

# Build base16 theme packages
$ nix build .#themes-base16

# Build only the 'decaf' theme package
$ nix build .#themePackages.x86_64-linux.base16.decaf

themePackages is keyed by system, so the system segment is required.

Generated install paths include:

• GTK themes under share/themes/Basix-<slug>/...
  • gtk-2.0/gtkrc
  • gtk-3.0/gtk.css
  • gtk-4.0/gtk.css
• Qt color schemes under:
  • share/qt5ct/colors/Basix-<slug>.conf
  • share/qt6ct/colors/Basix-<slug>.conf
• Kvantum theme assets under:
  • share/Kvantum/Basix-<slug>/Basix-<slug>.kvconfig
  • share/Kvantum/Basix-<slug>/Basix-<slug>.svg

These are generated from Base16/Base24 palettes and intentionally keep styling flat and conservative for broad compatibility.

Why?

There are not many theming solutions for Nix. Those that already exist are either too convoluted, or straight up bad in terms of code quality or/and execution. This leads me to use (and recommend) home-baked theming modules for in-home usage, but there was not a good Base16 solution on Nix. Basix aims to solve this issue by providing you an auto-updated collection of Base16 and Base24 color palettes. As opposed to traditional hacks needed to convert YAML to JSON and then read it, you can simply consume attribute sets derived from JSON schemes while Basix does the heavy lifting for you.

Basix might come in handy in scenarios you wish to theme individual applications from a pre-defined color palette.

Credits

• @Gerg-l for the clinically insane import function.
• @arcnmx/base16.nix for the idea.

License

Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.

Footnotes

1. I'm being generous here. The obscure reason is the myth that YAML is human readable. Guess what? It is actually nowhere near human readable and you should avoid it ↩