Change colorscheme of all active Micro instances from outside of Micro

[bartekpacia]

Description of the problem or steps to reproduce

I'd like to be able to make Micro dynamically react to OS-wide dark theme setting. To do this, I'd like to be able to change a colorscheme of a running Micro instance from outside

I wanted to write a Python script which runs in the background all the time and listens for OS theme changes. When such change occurs, the script would do something like:

micro -colorscheme default # for dark mode
# or
micro -colorscheme bubblegum # for light mode

But the above commands do the different thing than I expected – they launch a new micro instance with changed colorscheme, and not modify the colorscheme of all running micro instances.

So, how can I achieve that auto-theme-changing behavior?

Specifications

OS: macOS 12.4
Terminal: iTerm 2 v3.4.16

[bartekpacia]

@zyedidia Does it sound like a reasonable feature? I could contribute it.

[zamsyt]

I found there's another way to get automatic dark/light mode. Some of the colorschemes, like cmc-16 and geany, match the dark/light mode of the terminal. Just picking one of these seems to work for me.

[bartekpacia]

Oh how nice! Thanks for sharing!

Unfortunately geany is barely readable in light mode (yellow text...):

but cmc-16 works great - my new default :)

[zyedidia]

I think we shouldn't have code that tries to read the system default for light/dark mode, but there are non 256-color colorschemes (like cmc-16 or simple) that just use the 16 colors from the terminal palette that should be able to serve this purpose well.

[zyedidia]

By the way, you can modify the colorscheme of all instances by modifying the settings in ~/.config/micro/settings.json, so you could make a script that edits the json there.

[texastoland]

Some of the colorschemes, like cmc-16 and geany, match the dark/light mode of the terminal.

Cool! Looks like simple and (ironically) solarized work too. If you still want to switch you can use the defaults trick on Mac from dandavison/delta#447 (comment).

[bartekpacia]

I have this in my ~/.zshrc and it works great! I hope you'll like it too:

if command -v micro >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    if [ "$(uname)" = Darwin ]; then
        # automatically set light/dark theme on macOS
        alias micro="micro -colorscheme=\$(defaults read -globalDomain AppleInterfaceStyle &> /dev/null && echo monokai || echo bubblegum)"
    fi
fi