Change themes at runtime

[gsamokovarov]

I use light and dark themes but prefer to change them throughout the day with my custom light and dark shell functions rather than depend on the OS's dark mode. At the moment, I have not found a way to change the Ghostty application theme at runtime.

A hacky way to accomplish such tasks is to rewrite the config file with my shell functions and force a config reload with a ghostly CLI action. The documentation lists the reload_config keybinding action. However, since it is a keybinding action, I don't think I can trigger it programmatically with the `ghostly' CLI.

Can we force a configuration to reload programmatically or change a setting programmatically for an already running Ghostty application?

[rhodes-b]

there is no way to programmatically control ghostty yet. This is planned though take a look at (#2353) here for example

[gsamokovarov]

For others looking to script the Ghostty config reload, here is how to reload the config with AppleScript on macOS. Run it with osascript:

tell application "System Events"
  tell application "Ghostty" to activate
  delay 0.5
  tell process "Ghostty"
    click menu item "Reload configuration" of menu "Ghostty" of menu bar 1
  end tell
end tell

[jaysonfrancis]

++Subscribed

For reference, i do the following with iterm, which changes my terminal config during remote sessions.

Maybe some combination of setting config-file=?remote_config & triggering reload_config action.

# ~/.zshrc
if [[ -n $SSH_CONNECTION ]]; then
  echo -e "\033]50;SetProfile=remote\a"
else
  echo -e "\033]50;SetProfile=local\a"
fi

# ~/.zlogout
echo -e "\033]50;SetProfile=local\a"

---

Heres my temporary hack. (Mac only)

# ~/.config/ghostty/config
theme = tokyonight
config-file=?remote_config

# ~/.config/ghostty/remote_config
theme=ayu

Trigger between the two

# .zshrc
function rg(){
    # path to optional config
    local file="$HOME/.dotfiles/config/ghostty/remote_config"
    local file_off="${file}_off"
    # rename file on/off 
    [ -f "$file" ] && mv "$file" "$file_off" || mv "$file_off" "$file"
    # mac: trigger reload_config
    osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke "," using {command down, shift down}'
}

[gsamokovarov]

My scripts now change the theme in the config file and reload it with the AppleScript above.

Your AppleScript is a good hack as well!

osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke "," using {command down, shift down}'

I honestly think a ghostly +reload_config is better intermediate solution to "hacky" scripting until a proper system is implemented.