Targets

Contents

• Targets
  • Terminal
    • Gnome Terminal
    • iTerm2
    • How it is done?
  • Vim
    • Intro
    • Implemented Solution
    • Configuring this target
  • Wallpaper
    • macOS
    • Linux
  • Rofi
  • Lightline
    • Intro
    • Add new themes
    • Color Extraction
    • Configuring this target
  • i3
  • Yabar
  • How to add a target?

Terminal

Gnome Terminal

GNOME Terminal is a terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop environment written by Havoc Pennington and others. In order to create a new profile, this class makes use of a shell script executing dconf commands.

iTerm2

This program is a replacement for Terminal and works on Macs with macOS 10.10 or newer. iTerm2 brings the terminal into the modern age with features you never knew you always wanted. For more information, please check their website. It can be downloaded and installed from its website, or with homebrew’s cask extension: brew cask install iterm2.

Hapycolor creates an iTerm’s profile which is added to the terminal preferences’ file named after the provided image’s name.

Note

For some themes, you might want to switch to the dark mode, to do so, go to Preferences > Appearance and in the Theme:’s menu, select Dark.

Note

By default, iTerm2 uses the configuration file located in: ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist, which is automatically encoded as an Apple binary property list. It is possible to use a custom file by enabling Load preferences from a custom folder or URL: in Preferences > General > Preferences, and selecting a target folder. Then, when configuring hapycolor, you will be prompted to provide the path to the generated custom preferences file or to choose the default one.

How it is done?

A terminal profile, usually requires sixteen base colors:

Or better said, two colors per for eight different hues, a bright one, and a normal one.

In order for hapycolor to create a profile matching the conventional description, it splits the palette into six clusters according to their hues, and then, splits each one by their luminosity. That way, by taking the medoids of each clusters, we end up with twelve colors, a bright and a darker one for six different group of hues. The last four colors are default values for the blacks and whites.

In addition, hapycolor allows the user to choose whether or not the generated profile should be set as the default profile.

Vim

Intro

Vim (Vi IMproved) is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient, compatible with most UNIX distributions. It can be installed with your favorite package manager, which can be confirmed by running the command vim --version.

Implemented Solution

First of all, before presenting our implemented solution, the user needs to know that vim defines a color profile by mapping colors to syntactic groups. Ususally, there are eleven main groups (Comment, Constant, Statement, etc.) that contains subgroups, for instance, “Constant” contains “String”, “Character”, “Number”, “Boolean” or “Float”. The full list can be found on vim’s syntax documentation.

When devising a way to optimize the color distribution for each syntactic color, we understood that the goal was to extract clusters of colors from the palette and map each cluster to each major group (and then, each color of the cluster to each syntax subgroup of the group). One additional constraint is that two frequently used syntax elements cannot be mapped to close clusters of colors. For instance, constants and identifiers are frequently used (in the sense that in a classic python source code, the frequency of letters belonging to those groups are the highest). Thus the hues used for identifiers and constants should be far apart. This problem can be identified as a Quadratic Assignment Problem which is ususally described as the following:

“There are a set of n facilities and a set of n locations. For each pair of locations, a distance is specified and for each pair of facilities a weight or flow is specified (e.g., the amount of supplies transported between the two facilities). The problem is to assign all facilities to different locations with the goal of minimizing the sum of the distances multiplied by the corresponding flows.”

So, by solving this problem, we consider that the color mapping can be appropriate in most cases.

Configuring this target

When configuring this target, if you are using common paths to manage your plugins, such as ~/.vim/bundle, ~/.vim/pack/bundle/start or ~/.vim_runtime/sources_non_forked, hapycolor should automatically install the colorscheme to the right place. Else, you will be prompted to input the path of the location where the plugin should be installed. If you are not using any plugin manager, enter the following commands in your vimrc:

! Using plug
Plug 'hapycolor'

To activate the generated colorscheme, use the command colorscheme hapycolor from the Ex command line or add it to your vimrc.

Note

Currently, it supports 8bit and 24bit color terminals. By default, vim only supports 8bit colors, but if your terminal supports 24bit colors, it is highly advised to set the option set termguicolor, available since Vim 7.4, in your vimrc.

Wallpaper

macOS

Hapycolor allows you to automatically set the provided image as the wallpaper of the current workspace. This target works only if desktoppicture.db exists in the folder ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/, which should be allways true in recent versions of macOS.

Linux

Hapycolor uses feh to set the wallpaper if the target is enabled. In addition, if i3 is also enabled, hapycolor will add/replace feh’s command with the new provided image.

Rofi

Rofi is a window switcher, application launcher and dmenu replacement much appreciated by i3’s community.

This version of hapycolor prefers using templates instead of letting the user directly provide a rofi’s configuration file with hapycolor’s macros since some effort is required in order to understand how the configuration interacts with the end result. So, it seemed more interesting using templates that already contain color macros. If a user wants to add his own templates, this can be done by just adding the file with a ‘.rasi’ extension into ./hapycolor/targets/rofi/.

Currently supported themes:

• Monokai
• lb
• arc-red-dark

Lightline

Intro

A light and configurable statusline/tabline plugin for Vim. To install this plugin, please check itchyny’s repository.

It currently supports various themes inspired from lightline’s repository:

• Solarized
• Wombat
• One
• Landscape

Add new themes

In order to add new themes, a template should be added in hapycolor/targets/lightline_themes/, written in a flattened [1] format, as the other themes, and can use the following undefined variables: $FG, $BG, $NORMAL, $INSERT, $REPLACE and $VISUAL. An easy way could be to define at the beginning of the template the following variable declarations:

let s:foreground = [ $FG ]
let s:background = [ $BG ]
let s:normal = [ $NORMAL ]
let s:insert = [ $INSERT ]
let s:replace = [ $REPLACE ]
let s:visual = [ $VISUAL ]

[1]	Each color of the theme must be defined as a pair 24bit and 8 bit color: [ ‘#24bit_color’, ‘8bit_color’ ]

Color Extraction

The variables defined by hapycolor will then be defined when exporting the palette, by dividing it into four clusters and taking the medoid of each one as the selected color. Except for the background and foreground colors that are already defined in the palette.

Configuring this target

To enable this target, for a simple configuration, the following instruction should be added to the vimrc:

let g:lightline = {'colorscheme': 'hapycolor' }

By default, Vim displays the current mode (except for ‘normal’) in the bottom left section of the editor, to disable it, use: set showmode!. For more information on how to configure this target, please check its repository.

Then, hapycolor’s initialization will require the user to enter the path of this plugin.

i3

The class hapycolor.targets.i3.I3 implements two features:

• Inserts feh’s command in order to set the new wallpaper

  This will be done only if this feature was enabled.

• Supports hapycolor’s macro to replace colors.

  For more info about this, please check out hapycolor.configuration_editor.ConfigurationEditor, or the Configuration Editor. That way, a user can, for instance, use a generated color as the border color of i3’s windows:

# class          border      backgr     text      split
# @hapycolor(    "random",   "random",  None,     "random")
client.focused   #000000     #000000    #000000   #000000

Yabar

Yabar is a modern and lightweight status bar that is intended to be used along with minimal X window managers like bspwm and i3. It is being mainly developed by geommer and the source code is available on github.

Hapycolor supports yabar’s configuration files and allows users to define colors to be replaced through the use of hapycolor’s macros (see hapycolor.configuration_editor.ConfigurationEditor).

How to add a target?

In order to add a target, two steps are required:

First, a class extending hapycolor.targets.base.Target needs to be implemented in the module hapycolor.targets. The main method, the static function hapycolor.targets.base.Target.export(), takes in a palette of colors and the path to the image. Other methods that should be implemented are:

• hapycolor.targets.base.Target.compatible_os()

  which defines a list of compatible OS.

• hapycolor.targets.base.Target.initialize_config()

  which interacts with the user and stores in its respective section of the configuration file, persistent data needed to export a palette. For instance, the path of vim’s hapycolor colorscheme.

• hapycolor.targets.base.Target.reconfigure()

  this method can be triggered by hapycolor’s –reconfigure and the name of the target. This function should allow the user to change the persistent data defined when first initializing the target. For instance, a user might want to stop setting the generated terminal profile as the default profile.

Finally, the module’s name needs to be imported into hapycolor.targets’s environment. In other words, from . import <new_target_module> must be added in hapycolor.targets.

Note

Maybe, in a near future, this last constraint could be removed by inspecting all the classes of the module and retrieving only the one that implements the abstract hapycolor.targets.base.Target. This solution could perhaps, remove the need for a second step.