Applications without home manager modules.

[hallonfras]

Hi!

How would you guys suggest extending the theming to applications which don't have a home manager module. Is there some way to use the colors in a template or such? On a similar note, can the default templates be modified somehow e.g if i want a different theme for discord which still uses the stylix colors?

Thanks in advance for help!

[trueNAHO]

How would you guys suggest extending the theming to applications which don't have a home manager module.

I assume nearly everyone manages their Nix system through some framework like NixOS, Home Manager, or nix-darwin, instead of manually installing plain pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivations. With that in mind, if you do not use Home Manager, then it should probably integrate with another framework.

Is there some way to use the colors in a template or such?

You can access the internal Stylix colorscheme:

stylix/docs/src/configuration.md

Lines 88 to 117 in 7dfcdb4

	### Extending
	When passing colors to unsupported targets or creating custom modules, it
	is possible to access values from the configured color scheme through
	`config.lib.stylix.colors`.
	An overview of the available values is shown below.
	```nix
	config.lib.stylix.colors = {
	base08 = "ff0000";
	base08-hex-r = "ff";
	base08-dec-r = "0.996094";
	# ...
	red = "ff0000";
	# ...
	withHashtag = {
	base08 = "#ff0000";
	# ...
	};
	};
	```
	This attrset is generated by `mkSchemeAttrs` from `base16.nix`. Refer to the
	[documentation](https://github.com/SenchoPens/base16.nix/blob/main/DOCUMENTATION.md#mkschemeattrs)
	for more info.
	For more complex configurations you may find it simpler to use
	[mustache](http://mustache.github.io/) templates to generate output files.
	See [base16.nix](https://github.com/SenchoPens/base16.nix) documentation for
	usage examples.

On a similar note, can the default templates be modified somehow e.g if i want a different theme for discord which still uses the stylix colors?

This is a known limitation:

I wanted to override a few colors for Gnome (without recreating all the needed derivations), but it looks like that the template is hardcoded.

Ideally, we would upstream (NixOS, Home Manager, or nix-darwin) relevant options to seamlessly integrate Stylix into external Nix code.

There's this relevant thread: #159 about moving these templates out-of-tree. Would a PR for separating the mustache template to a different repo be acceptable here?

The future Vim highlight groups would allow us to get rid of mustache templates:

the roadmap eventually causes Stylix to implement all templates without relying on external dependencies

-- #567 (comment)

[...]

Are the patches really suitable for upstreaming though? It contains a lot of stylix-specific changes, like removing dark mode. The style sheet itself is also fairly opinionated and custom, which is not something I usually see upstream.

My idea was to move our string injection architecture

xdg.configFile."<MODULE>".text = "<KEY>=<VALUE>";

upstream, and then we only use its interface:

programs.<MODLE>.extraConfig."<KEY>" = "<VALUE>";

This centralizes the string injection upstream and hopefully gets rid of override issues:

the use of extraConfig might cause other potentially related issues. As discussed in #159 (comment), it makes it harder to override options, and as discussed in #388 (comment), it makes it easier to accidentally override Stylix options.

-- #395

-- NAHO, "Overriding Gnome template"

• Is there any way around this?
• How can this be solved?

Unless you copy-paste and slightly modify the current Stylix module implementation, I am unaware of a reliable solution before the previously mentioned limitations have been resolved. Depending on the configuration format, lib.mkAfter could be used.

-- NAHO, "Using stylix with home.file"

[danth]

Link to the rendered version of the docs mentioned above: https://stylix.danth.me/configuration.html#extending