this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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It's very clear that the ricing community wants to set any given colorscheme in many apps automatically, most tools do so either with wallpapers (which is inherently opinionated), or the base16 spec. The original base16 repo hasn't been updated in over 2 years, and 16 colors simply isn't enough to make rich granular themes, especially when code has many different syntax elements. We need a successor that allows for more colors on both TUIs and GUIs, more than 16 colors (like 24 or even 32), mapped more granularly.

My story:

I've spent lots of time looking at how to have good colorschemes in apps that change dynamically, to make my desktop pretty and with variety. Many tools can apply colorschemes to apps using image / wallpaper colors like Matugen and Pywal. These tools are very well made, but I realized I actually prefer rainbow colorschemes like Catppuccin. Either way I got attached Matugen, fortunately it can be used without wallpapers and supports custom keywords, there are also base16 colorscheme managers like flavours and tinty.

But Cattppuccin's base16 theme didn't look right compared to its Neovim plugin. The plugin is very well integrated and colors a lot things for you that base16 plugins may not, I would have to set certain UI colors myself if I wanted them to match. Some of the major colors (variables, keywords, brackets, etc.) were shuffled around, so out of the box Catppuccin's base16 theme doesn't even match Cattppuccin's original vision / color harmony. All of this probably applies to other colorschemes as well. So if I want to switch between different schemes while staying true to each one, I would need to set up plugins for each app rather than automatically.

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[–] MultipleAnimals@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Fun to try out but too much hassle for me to keep every app themed, and same colors everywhere gets boring after some time.

I transitioned from DE's to WM's, kept using many for a long time, then back to DE's. Happy KDE user now. "Everything just works". If i get back to programming hobby then i'll probably use WM again, but not gonna spend too much time theming that thing.