Pywal integration & live update

This page is for those who want to dynamically change mako’s colors when their wal colors change.

Create a $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mako/update-theme.sh script:

#!/bin/sh

. "${HOME}/.cache/wal/colors.sh"

conffile="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mako/config"

# Associative array, color name -> color code.
declare -A colors
colors=(
    ["background-color"]="${background}89"
    ["text-color"]="$foreground"
    ["border-color"]="$color13"
)

for color_name in "${!colors[@]}"; do
  # replace first occurance of each color in config file
  sed -i "0,/^$color_name.*/{s//$color_name=${colors[$color_name]}/}" $conffile
done

makoctl reload
# additionally here you can add some notify-send test notification

And call this script from whichever place is regenerating your wal color palette.

It will change 3 lines and only 1st occurences of them all:

• background-color
• text-color
• border-color

In case any color setting was missing in config file the script will not add it to your config file. Feel free to modify the script and update this page.

Note: disadvantage of this script is that if you have mako config file in git, you will see it modified every time this script runs. As a workaround you can create config.default file, have it in git instead of actuall config file and modify the script to first output default config file to actual one and only then run sed on it.

---

As addition for those who have customized their format option. It is difficult to make a ‘working for everyone’ regexp so i will just put here my sed regexp to maybe ease you the job of writing one.

I have following format option:

format=<span color="#A0A0A5" size="13pt" line_height="1.4"><b>%a</b></span>\n<span color="#9a9a9c"><i>%s</i></span>\n<tt>%b</tt>

In order to change title and summary colors i have following command in script above:

sed -i "s/\(^format=.\{1,10\}color=\"\).\{4,9\}\(\".\{30,60\}color=\"\).\{4,9\}\(\".*\)/\1${color3}\2${color8}\3/" $conffile