Darky

Your Omarchy theme and wallpaper, following the sun.

Darky is an Omarchy (Quattro) shell plugin. Pick a theme and a background for day and another pair for night, tell it where you live, and it swaps them at sunrise and sunset — no systemd service, no shell script glued to a timer.

Night	Day

Why this exists

Omarchy 4 moved the whole desktop into one Quickshell process with a plugin system. Day/night theming was the last piece still living outside it: a darkman systemd service, a script in ~/.local/share/darkman/, a theme pair in one config file and a wallpaper choice nowhere in particular.

Darky is a friendly attempt to make that unnecessary on Omarchy. darkman is a fine, portable daemon and Darky borrows its ideas outright — including its light-mode.d / dark-mode.d script contract, so anything you wrote for it keeps working. Darky just moves the job inside the shell, where the themes and wallpapers already live, and puts all of it behind one panel.

Requirements

• Omarchy 4 (Quattro) or newer, with the Quickshell plugin system
• jq, curl, flock, gsettings — all present on a stock Omarchy install
• omarchy-theme-set, omarchy-theme-bg-set, omarchy-theme-color, omarchy-hook — shipped with Omarchy

Nothing else. The sun math runs locally, so the schedule keeps working offline; the network is touched only while you type in the city search.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/mehiel/mehiel.darky.git --enable

Then add the Darky widget to your bar from Setup > Plugins, or click the sun/moon that appears in it. The panel is the whole configuration surface.

To remove it:

omarchy plugin remove mehiel.darky

Your settings stay in ~/.local/state/darky/ so a reinstall picks up where you left off. Delete that directory to forget them.

First run

Darky seeds itself from whatever you already have:

• location from ~/.config/darkman/config.yaml
• theme pair from ~/.config/omarchy/light-dark.conf
• otherwise white / tokyo-night and 07:00 / 19:00

If darkman is still running, retire it — two schedulers fighting over one theme is a bad time:

systemctl --user disable --now darkman.service
mv ~/.config/omarchy/hooks/post-boot.d/darkman-theme.sh{,.sample}  # if you have one

Using it

The bar icon is a sun during the day and a crescent at night, dimmed when the schedule is paused, so you can read the state without opening anything. Click it for the panel, middle-click to toggle.

• Auto follows the schedule. Day and Night pin the desktop. Paused stops Darky touching anything.
• Pinning asks whether you mean it until further notice or only until the next sunrise/sunset. Temporary choices survive a shell restart and expire on their own.
• Pair is two rows of theme chips — every installed Omarchy theme, light ones offered for day and dark ones for night — with the backgrounds of the selected theme underneath. Auto leaves the wallpaper to the theme.
• Schedule is sunrise/sunset for a city, or fixed times. City search is type-ahead; the coordinates and timezone are stored once and used offline afterwards.
• The ribbon across the top is the local day, night shaded, with a marker at now.

Missed transitions are caught up on login and after suspend, so a laptop that slept through sunset wakes up dark.

Bind a key

-- ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua
o.bind("SUPER + ALT + T", "Toggle day/night",
  os.getenv("HOME") .. "/.config/omarchy/plugins/mehiel.darky/bin/darky-toggle")

darky-toggle asks the shell first and falls back to darky-apply when the shell is not running, so the bind also works from a TTY.

Command line

omarchy-shell mehiel.darky status    # JSON: mode, appearance, next event, pair, errors
omarchy-shell mehiel.darky toggle    # flip until the next transition
omarchy-shell mehiel.darky light     # or: dark — temporary, same as toggle
omarchy-shell mehiel.darky auto      # drop the override, return to the schedule
omarchy-shell mehiel.darky modeDay   # or: modeNight, modePaused, modeAuto — persistent
omarchy-shell mehiel.darky apply     # re-apply the current mode
omarchy-shell mehiel.darky refresh   # rescan installed themes and backgrounds

omarchy-shell mehiel.darky.panel open    # or: close, toggle — the panel window

Configuration

Everything the panel writes lives in ~/.local/state/darky/settings.json. Edit it by hand if you prefer; Darky watches the file and repaints the desktop the moment it changes.

{
  "mode": "auto",
  "schedule": "solar",
  "dayStart": "07:00",
  "nightStart": "19:00",
  "location": {
    "name": "Athens",
    "latitude": 37.9,
    "longitude": 23.7,
    "timezone": "Europe/Athens"
  },
  "light": { "theme": "white", "background": "" },
  "dark":  { "theme": "tokyo-night", "background": "" }
}

Other files:

Hooks

Anything in ~/.config/omarchy/hooks/darky.d/ runs after the desktop already looks right, with the mode, theme slug and background path as arguments:

# ~/.config/omarchy/hooks/darky.d/50-editor
mode="$1" theme="$2" background="$3"
sed -i "s/^set background=.*/set background=$mode/" ~/.vimrc

A single ~/.config/omarchy/hooks/darky script works too — that is Omarchy's convention, and omarchy-hook darky is what Darky calls.

darkman's directories still run as well, after the hooks above:

~/.local/share/light-mode.d/   ~/.local/share/dark-mode.d/
/usr/share/light-mode.d/       /usr/share/dark-mode.d/

Without the shell

bin/darky-apply light|dark [theme-slug] [background-path]

That is the whole transition — theme, background, color-scheme, light-dark.conf, hooks — in one script. With no arguments beyond the mode it reads settings.json, which is what makes it a working fallback when the shell is down.

Privacy

City search sends what you type to Open-Meteo's geocoding API, and only while the field has two or more characters. Nothing else leaves the machine: no IP geolocation, no telemetry, and sunrise and sunset are computed locally with the NOAA solar algorithm. Open-Meteo's free API is non-commercial; see their terms.

Development

git clone https://github.com/mehiel/mehiel.darky ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/mehiel.darky
omarchy-restart-shell

node tests/model.test.js                          # solar math and settings logic
omarchy plugin validate .
/usr/lib/qt6/bin/qmllint *.qml                    # the Qt5 qmllint in PATH says nothing useful

Pull requests welcome. If something about the schedule looks wrong, the fastest useful bug report is omarchy-shell mehiel.darky status plus your timezone.

Credits

• darkman by Hugo Barrera, for the model and the script contract this keeps compatible.
• NightMan, for showing what a well-behaved appearance plugin looks like on Quattro.
• Open-Meteo for city search, CC BY 4.0.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.