Asinine Curio Chest

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Dark mode for git gui

By Sai Nane2024-11-28

This is a short, mostly “note to myself”, because this took an annoyingly long time to work out, and there is a lot of conflicting advice.

git gui is still the best frontend to selectively stage changes for cohesive commits or fixups. git add -p at best does the same job for entire hunks, or requires much more interaction for specific line sets. IDEs and their extensions tend to elide the full power of git at inconvenient times.

Still, it would be nice to use classic tools without the sudden change in brightness burning out your eyes with the force of a thousand suns.

Setting up gitk was simple enough: https://github.com/dracula/gitk.git works exactly as described.

For git gui, there’s an open issue on git gui about this, which doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and suggests many approaches which didn’t work for me. Elsewhere, there were recommendations to source theme files directly from .wishrc, which I couldn’t get to work.

What did work was to install Debian’s tcl-awthemes, and set the theme to awdark in .Xresources:

! To update live: echo '*TkTheme: awdark' | xrdb -merge -
! Use the awdark theme from the tcl-awthemes packages for git gui, gitk, etc
*TkTheme: awdark

As indicated, echo '*TkTheme: awdark' | xrdb -merge - is needed unless you want to log out and back in again.

However, with a fresh install, this still keeps the title bar in light mode.

Going through my usual process step by step, the title bar is themed correctly after setting Settings tab -> Miscellaneous options -> Dark mode -> Prefer dark mode in the cinnamon Themes application, then after completing up to and including the third of the following commands:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme 'prefer-dark'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme Adwaita-dark
gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.interface gtk-theme Adwaita-dark
gsettings set org.cinnamon.theme name 'Adwaita-dark'
git gui fully themed in dark mode, including the title bar

I haven’t tried this under Wayland. Maybe there, TK will look at .Xdefaults instead of using the .Xresources database, and I should create a symlink now to avoid strife for Future!Me. For now, I will not, since I’m curious to see what will happen when I do migrate.

Being able to dig deep at a moment’s notice is a big part of why I appreciate the Linux ecosystem. But every once in a while, I encounter enough balkanization that leaves me very sad.

On the other hand, I run journalctl -b -g screensaver -n 20 to look for PAM errors forbidding setuid to the screensaver, to get the timestamp for exactly when I came back from a break. There is a certain beauty in appreciating something figuratively held together with duct tape and string, no matter how horrifying.