colourd

colourd is a daemon that observes when the theme changes on macOS and executes all the files in the ~/Library/Application Support/colourd/ directory.

Installation

Source

The application can be built from source by cloning the repository and running the following command which requires working versions of Make and Swift which come bundled with most macOS installations.

git clone https://github.com/tshakalekholoane/colourd && cd colourd
make install

Homebrew

Alternatively, using run the following commands using Homebrew.

brew tap tshakalekholoane/taps
brew install colourd

Example

The following illustrates how to use colourd to automatically switch the background in Neovim on macOS using Python and pynvim.

Create and place the following file in the $HOME/.config/colourd/ directory and be sure to check that it has executable permission by running the command chmod +x $filename where $filename is the name of the script that colourd will execute every time the theme changes.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys

import pynvim

try:
    nvim = pynvim.attach("socket", path="/tmp/nvim")
except FileNotFoundError:
    print("Socket not found.", file=sys.stderr)
    sys.exit(1)

# colourd passes in the appearance value ("dark" or "light") as the 
# first argument to the script.
background = sys.argv[1]
nvim.command(f"set background={background}")

Start colourd using the following command:

# Assuming the binary is in the current directory.
nohup ./colourd >> colourd.log &

This will run colourd in the background and write error messages to a file named colourd.log in the same directory.

Next, start Neovim using this command to open a socket where Neovim will listen for incoming commands.

NVIM_LISTEN_ADDRESS=/tmp/nvim nvim 

Now when the theme changes, colourd should execute the script above which will send a command to Neovim via the socket to change the background to the current macOS appearance.