Feat: Accent colour through GNOME Portal

[cyrneko]

For a little bit now, we have had a proper accent color API that was implemented in KDE and eventually GNOME

Because we use the xdg-desktop-portal-gnome we should be able to pass accent colour information using it (as far as I understand) based on a value set in Niri's configuration, think maybe a accent-color that then accepts the same (non-gradient) values as the focus-ring or border do

Of course GNOME Apps don't accept just any color, from behavior I've seen on KDE it seems to choose the closest GNOME Color, so a megenta-ish color would become GNOME's purple, an ultramarine color would become GNOME's blue, etc

Maybe also a way to sync the accent with (one of) the focus-ring or border colors? Not sure how useful that'd be though...

Oh, and to get that out of the way, there is probably a way to do this with dbus that I simply don't know about, just thought proper config for this would be cool 🥴

[YaLTeR]

Hey, there is indeed a dconf method:

$ dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/interface/accent-color "'yellow'"

(note the single quotes inside double quotes)

Or you could run gnome-control-center and change there:

$ XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=gnome gnome-control-center

I'm not sure I want to build this setting into niri because it is a GNOME setting which we need just because we happen to currently use the GNOME portal. Similarly to how there's no niri light-dark toggle, and instead you need to write to dconf by hand.

[cyrneko]

oh I didn't notice that dconf path existing 🥴

Though...I am pretty sure this does limit you to the GNOME colors, where things like e.g Plasma expose any color of the users' choice...but that just comes from my expectations of GNOME, I don't expect them to allow setting an arbitrary hex color value, and even with Plasma setting a fully custom one in GNOME apps it ends up being a different similar one

thanks for the dconf command though 👀

[YaLTeR]

You could probably set in niri-portals.conf to use the KDE portal for Settings. Then it'll use the KDE accent color setting.

[valpackett]

IMO it should be the other way around: use the dconf color in niri, for example with color functions:

layout {
    focus-ring {
        active-gradient from="lighten(--gnome-accent-color, 0.1)" to="darken(--gnome-accent-color, 0.1)" angle=45
    }
}

Though in my crazy project of building an "actually GNOME session based" DE (like what Phosh does) something like that would be hardcoded anyway 🙃