vim-lumen

This plugin enables vim to follow the global system-wide dark mode preference of your platform.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/21310755/164289278-6368d615-e363-4185-a7c1-0f79ae3bf7b1.mov

At the moment, supported platforms are Linux and MacOS, but PRs are highly welcome to add support for other platforms.

Installation

With vim-plug add the following line to your .vimrc:

Plug 'vimpostor/vim-lumen'

Once a system dark mode preference change is detected, this plugin will set the background vim option accordingly, so make sure that your colorscheme supports reloading as described in :h 'background'.

Dependencies

Linux

On Linux it is required that you have gdbus installed together with one of the following options:

• KDE Plasma 5.24 (or later) or
• Gnome 42 (or later) or
• darkman (Recommended for tiling WMs) or
• color-scheme-simulator

MacOS

It is required that Swift is available on your system. Swift is shipped with Xcode for example.

FAQ

How can I add custom callbacks?

You can use the LumenLight and LumenDark User autocommands:

au User LumenLight echom 'Entered light mode'
au User LumenDark echom 'Entered dark mode'

Why not use the new SIGWINCH autocmd in neovim?

Neovim recently merged support for SIGWINCH autocmds. It is possible to hack together dark mode support by abusing the SIGWINCH autocmd, but this has quite a few disadvantages:

• You require a terminal that sends SIGWINCH when the system-wide dark mode preference changes. At the moment, pretty much no terminal supports this besides iTerm
• The SIGWINCH event is fired regularly for other events. For example while resizing the window, SIGWINCH can be emitted many times per second, which causes performance issues due to checking the system dark mode preference multiple times per second
• This plugin is interrupted immediately after the system-wide dark mode preference changes thus eliminating the need to manually look up the dark mode preference
• SIGWINCH is not really intended for this usecase at all. You are abusing a signal that is originally only meant to be fired when the terminal size changes
• There is only SIGWINCH support in neovim, whereas this plugin also supports regular vim