How Omarchy Themes Work (and How to Build Your Own)

One of my favorite things about Omarchy is how easy it is to make it look like yours. Here’s how a theme is put together, so you can build one.

What a theme is

An Omarchy theme is just a folder of config files and wallpapers. Each file styles one piece of the desktop: Hyprland borders, the terminal colors, the bar, the launcher, the lock screen, notifications and your editor colors. Switching themes swaps those files and reloads the apps.

Building one

Copy an existing theme you like as a starting point, so you have every file you need.
Pick a small palette: a background, a foreground, one accent and a couple of supporting colors.
Go file by file and swap in your colors. Keep the same hex values everywhere so it feels consistent.
Drop your wallpapers in the backgrounds folder.
Switch to it from the theme menu and fix whatever looks off.

Tips: check contrast in the terminal and editor first since you stare at those all day, and keep your theme in git so you can share it or roll back. Check the manual for the current file list, since it changes as Omarchy grows.

The Easy Way: Build Your Theme With Aether

If hand-editing config files isn’t your thing, Aether does most of the work for you. It’s a visual theming app for Omarchy that pulls colors out of a wallpaper and applies them across your whole desktop: Hyprland, Waybar, your terminal, Neovim, btop and a bunch more. Here’s how I’d use it.

1. Open it

No install needed. Aether ships with Omarchy out of the box. Just hit Super + Space to open the app launcher and type Aether, or run aether from a terminal.

2. Pick a wallpaper and pull your colors

Open Aether and pick a wallpaper. You can drag and drop one, use the file picker, or search wallhaven right inside the app.
Click Extract. It builds a full 16-color palette from the image. There are a few extraction modes (Pastel, Muted, Bright, Monochromatic and more) if the first pass isn’t quite right.
Tweak whatever you want. There are sliders for vibrance, contrast, temperature and so on, a light/dark toggle, and a contrast checker so your terminal text stays readable.

Don’t want to start from a wallpaper? It ships with presets like Dracula, Nord, Gruvbox and Catppuccin, and it can import community Base16 schemes.

3. Save and export it

Save your theme as a blueprint so you can come back to it later. If you want to share it, Aether can export the theme as a package, and you choose which apps to include.

4. Apply it

Click Apply Theme and your desktop changes over. You can also apply a saved blueprint from the command line, which is handy for a keybind:

aether --apply-blueprint "My Theme"
aether --list-blueprints

Run aether --help to see the rest of the options. Honestly, this is the fastest way I’ve found to get a theme that actually matches my wallpaper.

Happy Hacking!