Rio theming in 9front

Steps

Here is presented an approach of theming rio without having to change its code every time a change of color is needed. Each nested rio may have a different color theme.

A patch should be applied, rio rebuilt, installed, and restarted.

bind -ac /dist/plan9front /
cd /sys/src/cmd/rio
hget https://ftrv.se/_/9/patches/rio-themes.patch | hg patch -f --no-commit -
mk install

The patch makes rio export /dev/theme file:

/dev/theme

With simple writes to /dev/theme one can change colors dynamically without having to recompile and restart rio. Themes can be stored to files and loaded again after rio has started:

/usr/glenda/bin/rc/riostart

window 'cat /usr/glenda/lib/theme/rio.theme > /mnt/wsys/theme;
	sleep 0.5;
	grep softscreen /dev/vgactl >> /dev/vgactl;
	echo hwblank off >> /dev/vgactl'

Writing to /dev/vgactl may cause hwblank to be enabled, hence the last line. You can skip that if on your laptop hwblank works fine.

/usr/glenda/lib/theme/rio.theme

rioback	/usr/glenda/lib/1920x1080.img
back	f1f1f1
high	cccccc
border	999999
text	000000
htext	000000
title	000000
ltitle	bcbcbc
hold	000099
lhold	005dbb
palehold	4993dd
paletext	6f6f6f
size	000000
menubar	448844
menuback	eaffea
menuhigh	448844
menubord	88cc88
menutext	000000
menuhtext	eaffea

As you can see, rioback in this example is set to a Plan 9 image, that’s the wallpaper. Images have to be of the same size as your screen and can be converted from a, for example, JPEG file as:

jpg -9t <coolwallpaper1920x1080.jpg >/usr/glenda/lib/1920x1080.img

Picker

rio theming

A more user-friendly interface is provided by installing picker and then running picker </dev/theme >/dev/theme.

Picker provides ways to snarf the entire theme, to revert a color or an entire palette, etc. With proper setup (see man picker) one can plumb a theme file to change it instantly (while picker is running).

Caveats

windows flashing, rio has to redraw all the windows to update colors
on native installations grep softscreen /dev/vgactl >> /dev/vgactl has to be executed when rio background color (or image) is changed, with drawterm it should be enough to resize it a bit
image file as a color isn’t shown in /dev/theme, patches welcome
the patch provided has riow functionality along with theming, didn’t have time to clean that one out; it shouldn’t cause any issues anyway

Extras

bar

Last update: November 20, 2020 12:07PM

anonymous

September 02, 2020 02:26AM

pls update for menuhit settings