Tinct

An extensible colour palette generator and theme manager for unified theming across your entire environment

Generate colour palettes from images, AI, remote themes, or manual specifications. Apply them consistently to terminals, desktop environments, window managers, and external devices.

Installation

Arch Linux (AUR):

yay -S tinct-bin

From Go:

go install github.com/jmylchreest/tinct/cmd/tinct@latest

From source:

git clone https://github.com/jmylchreest/tinct.git
cd tinct && go build -o tinct ./cmd/tinct

Quick start

From an image

# Apply theme to all configured applications
tinct generate -i image -p ~/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg -o all

From AI (Google Gemini)

Generate a unique wallpaper and theme from a text prompt:

# Set your API key (get one at https://aistudio.google.com/apikey)
export GOOGLE_API_KEY="your-api-key"

# Or retrieve it from a secret manager
export GOOGLE_API_KEY=$(secret-tool lookup service google-genai)  # GNOME Keyring
export GOOGLE_API_KEY=$(bw get password google-genai)             # Bitwarden CLI

# Generate a wallpaper and apply the extracted palette
tinct generate -i google-genai --ai.prompt "sunset over rolling hills of tuscany" -o all

OpenRouter is also supported as an alternative (-i openrouter), giving access to multiple AI models. See the AI generation docs for details.

From a popular theme

# Catppuccin Mocha
tinct generate -i remote-json \
  --remote-json.url "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/catppuccin/palette/main/palette.json" \
  --remote-json.query "colors.mocha" \
  -o all

Features

• Multiple input sources - Images, AI generation (Google Gemini, OpenRouter), remote themes (JSON/CSS), manual specification
• 25+ applications - Terminals, desktops, window managers, bars, editors
• Smart categorisation - Auto-assigns semantic colours with WCAG contrast checking
• Plugin ecosystem - Extend with external plugins from repositories or build your own in any language
• Theme portability - Save and share complete themes as markdown files

Supported applications

| Category | Applications | |----------|-------------| | Terminals | Alacritty, Ghostty, Kitty, Konsole, Ptyxis | | Desktop | GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma, GTK3/4, Libadwaita, Qt5/6 | | Hyprland | Hyprland, Hyprpaper, Hyprlock | | Bars & Launchers | Waybar, Dunst, SwayOSD, Fuzzel, Walker, Wofi | | Editors | Neovim, Zellij |

Need more? Install external plugins from the plugin repository:

tinct plugins repo add official https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jmylchreest/tinct-plugins/refs/heads/main/repository/repository.json
tinct plugins search
tinct plugins install <plugin-name>

Documentation

Full documentation is available at jmylchreest.github.io/tinct

• Getting started
• Plugin reference
• Templating guide
• Plugin development

Telemetry

Since v0.1.25, tinct collects anonymous usage telemetry to help prioritise plugin development and maintenance. Only basic event data is sent: OS name, app version, plugin names/versions used, and feature flags (theme type, seed mode, backend, dry-run, etc.). No personal information, file paths, prompts, API keys, or colour data is ever collected. Telemetry can be disabled by setting TINCT_TELEMETRY=off or {"enabled": false} in ~/.local/share/tinct/telemetry.json. See the telemetry docs for full details.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! See the documentation for development guides.

License

MIT License - see LICENSE