Themes

Marchyo comes with a single, coherent look already applied. Every surface — the terminal, the bar, the launcher, notifications, the lock screen, your GTK apps, even the boot splash — is colored from one design system, so nothing clashes and nothing looks half-themed. You don’t assemble a theme here; you pick a variant and, if you like, swap it out at runtime.

Dark or light

Out of the box you’re on the dark variant. To live in light instead, set the variant in your configuration and rebuild:

marchyo.theme.variant = "light";

The two variants are Paper (ink on warm paper, light) and Amber (amber on terminal black, dark). They share one palette family, so switching between them feels like the same desktop at a different time of day, not a different desktop. Syntax highlighting in your editor and terminal uses the Modus color sets, so code reads the same everywhere.

Switching themes at runtime

Changing variant means a rebuild. For a faster swap, Marchyo pre-builds a set of themes into your system so you can switch between them instantly, with no rebuild at all. The marchyo CLI drives it:

marchyo theme list        # what's available, with the active one marked
marchyo theme set light   # switch now
marchyo theme next        # cycle to the next one

By default the dark and light Jylhis themes are the two switchable options. You can add more — any named base16 scheme works — by listing them so they’re built into the system ahead of time:

marchyo.theme.themes = [
  "jylhis-dark"
  "jylhis-light"
  "nord"
  "gruvbox-dark-hard"
];

Marchyo owns the effective theme: the saved selection takes precedence over the Nix default. Activation and session startup restore that selection, or the default when no override exists. The selection supplies application assets and the desktop light/dark preference. Home Manager does not independently reset that preference while runtime theming is enabled. A failed preference update stops the switch before application links change. The saved selection stays unchanged. Use --revert to restore the Nix default, or --apply to make the selection declarative. Browsers keep the build-time colour, because their policy files are system-owned. Each theme can also carry its own wallpapers.

marchyo runtime restore reports failures and returns a nonzero status. It continues restoring independent overrides.

Fonts

Marchyo ships a set of typefaces that carry across the whole system: DejaVu Serif for serif text, Fira Sans for body and interface text, and IBM Plex Mono for monospace. The terminal and the desktop chrome (the icon glyphs in the bar and notifications need it) use BlexMono Nerd Font, IBM Plex Mono patched with icons. You don’t have to touch any of this — it’s chosen to look right together.

If you want everything a little larger or smaller, there’s one dial that moves every text surface at once:

marchyo.theme.fontScale = 1.5;  # everything ~50% larger

It defaults to 1.25, which is comfortably larger than typical Linux defaults. Set it to 1.0 for standard sizes, or higher for a HiDPI screen you sit far from, or for readability. Each surface scales from its own base size, so the proportions between, say, the bar and the terminal stay right.

Wallpaper

A generated Marchyo wallpaper is set for you and follows the active theme. Marchyo draws four patterns, a grid, dots, diagonal bands and contour lines, in a light and a dark variant from the design tokens; the grid is the default. To turn the set off, or point at your own wallpaper assets:

marchyo.theme.wallpaper.enable = false;

You can also change the wallpaper at runtime with marchyo bg set <path> or cycle with marchyo bg next; like a runtime theme switch, it is replayed after a rebuild until you revert it. An inline theme can list further wallpapers of its own with marchyo.theme.themes.[].wallpapers.