dye-your-shell 0.9.0

Apply color themes to a variety of shell command line tools.

dye-your-shell

activate color output in shell commands using themes and patterns

There are many modern *nix and *bsd command line tools which can output using a full 16.7 million color palette. For example:

• fzf
• dust
• bat
• gum
• eza

Even the GNU Project's venerable ls can show various types of files in different colors.

Unfortunately, these tools all use slightly different color configuration mechanisms. With enough fiddling, you can get your shell init scripts to make all these tools use a similar color scheme, but if you want to change it, you've got a lot of work ahead.

dye-your-shell installs a command line program named dye to do its work.

dye reads a configuration file to define a set of colors, and how to apply those colors to as many command line tools as can support it. This configuration file is called a pattern.

All that hand tweaking in your shell init files can now be replaced with:

export DYE_PATTERN_FILE=~/.dye/dracula.toml
source <(dye apply)

This changes all your environment variables and other settings for the many shell tools you use to reflect the colors in the theme you have specified.

Pattern Files

Here's an example of a pattern file:

#
# sample definition for a dracula theme

version = "1.0.0"
name = "dracula"

[styles]
# these are from https://draculatheme.com/contribute
background =  "#282a36"
foreground =  "#f8f8f2"

# styles for text and the highlighted line
# these are the only things fzf supports background colors for
text = "#f8f8f2 on default"
current_line =  "#f8f8f2 on #44475a"

# other colors from the dracula palette
comment =  "#6272a4"
cyan =  "#8be9fd"
green =  "#50fa7b"
orange =  "#ffb86c"
pink =  "#ff79c6"
purple =  "#bd93f9"
red =  "#ff5555"
yellow =  "#f1fa8c"

[scope.iterm]
agent = "iterm"
style.foreground = "foreground"
style.background = "background"

[scope.ls_colors]
agent = "environment_variables"
export.LS_COLORS = "$(vivid generate dracula)"

[scope.bat]
agent = "environment_variables"
export.BAT_THEME = "Dracula"

[scope.fzf]
agent = "fzf"
environment_variable = "FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS"
colorbase = "dark"

# command line options
opt.--pointer = "•"
opt.--prompt = "> "
opt.--bind = "ctrl-k:kill-line,ctrl-j:ignore,ctrl-u:unix-line-discard"

# these styles are special because they set both foreground and background
style.text = "text"
style.current_line = "current_line"

# no special parsing for these styles, just use the fzf color name
# highlighted substrings
style.hl = "pink"
# highlighted substrings current line
style."hl+" = "pink"
style.label = "green"
style.border = "orange"
style.prompt = "green"
style.pointer = "cyan"
style.query = "pink"

Installation

You'll need python version 3.9 or higher. Install with pipx:

$ pipx install dye-your-shell

You need a *nix-ish bash shell environment. Probably works in Windows Subsystem for Linux, but isn't tested there.