1darkman(1) General Commands Manual darkman(1)
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6 darkman - daemon for dark-mode and light-mode transitions on Linux
7 desktop
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10 darkman run
11 darkman set [light|dark]
12 darkman get
13 darkman toggle
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16 darkman runs in the background and turns on night mode at sundown, and
17 turns it off again at sunrise. darkman is not designed to be used in‐
18 teractively: it's designed to be set up once, and run in the back‐
19 ground.
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21 It is, however, possible trigger manual transitions and even disable
22 automatic transitions entirely.
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25 run
26 Runs the darman service. This command is intended to be executed by
27 a service manager, init script or alike.
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29 set <light|dark>
30 Sets the current mode.
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32 get
33 Prints the current mode.
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35 toggle
36 Toggle the current mode.
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39 The Linux desktop ecosystem is quite heterogeneous and switching be‐
40 tween dark/light mode on different applications requires different
41 mechanism and techniques.
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43 Darkman seeks to implement the more widely supported standards, while
44 leaving room for users to hook in custom scripts for other applica‐
45 tions.
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47 Darkman implements the Freedesktop dark mode standard. Applications us‐
48 ing this API should switch to dark/light mode based on darkman's cur‐
49 rent preference. This standard was originally pushed by the GNOME and
50 Elementary teams, and is currently supported by KDE, Firefox and many
51 other projects. You should expect applications from those environment
52 to support it, amongst others.
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54 For additional application support, custom scripts can be places in the
55 following two directories:
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57 • $XDG_DATA_DIRS/dark-mode.d/: Scripts to run when switching to dark
58 mode.
59 • $XDG_DATA_DIRS/light-mode.d/: Scripts to run when switching to
60 light mode.
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63 Scripts need to have an executable bit set, or will not be executed.
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65 For additional sample scripts (and discussion on how to integrate dif‐
66 ferent applications) see the project website:
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68 https://gitlab.com/WhyNotHugo/darkman
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70 For custom integrations, darkman exposes a D-Bus API which allows
71 querying and controlling the current mode. The get, set and toggle com‐
72 mands all use this API. Use this API is also the recommended approach
73 when writing custom tools (e.g.: switching the current mode based on
74 the input from a light sensor).
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77 darkman will automatically determine your location using geoclue. Geo‐
78 clue's reliability varies depending on distribution and desktop envi‐
79 ronment, and it will often not work without a geoclue agent running.
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81 If using geoclue is not an option, the location may be specified ex‐
82 plicitly via a configuration file.
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85 A configuration file and all settings are optional. Configuration is
86 read from ~/.config/darkman/config.yaml, and has the following format:
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88 lat: 52.3
89 lng: 4.8
90 dbusserver: true
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92 The following settings are available:
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94 • lat, lng: Latitude and longitude respectively. This value will be
95 used at start-up, but will later be superseded by whatever geoclue
96 resolves (if enabled). You generally don't need more than one deci‐
97 mal point for your location, as described in
98 https://xkcd.com/2170/.
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101 • dbusserver (true/false): Whether to expose the current mode via
102 darkman's own D-Bus API. The command line tool uses this API to ap‐
103 ply changes, so it will not work if this setting is disabled.
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106 • portal (true/false): Whether to expose the current mode via the XDG
107 settings portal D-Bus API. Many desktop application will read the
108 current mode via the portal and respect what darkman is indicating.
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111 • usegeoclue (true/false): Whether to use a local geoclue instance to
112 determine the current location. On some distributions/setups, this
113 may require setting up a geoclue agent to function properly.
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117 The following environment variables are also read and will override the
118 configuration file:
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120 DARKMAN_LAT
121 Overrides the latitude for the current location.
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123 DARKMAN_LNG
124 Overrides the longitude for the current location.
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126 DARKMAN_DBUSSERVER
127 Overrides whether to expose the current mode via D-Bus.
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130 Developed by Hugo O. Barrera <hugo@whynothugo.nl>, with invaluable con‐
131 tributions from the community.
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133 darkman is an open source project licensed under the ISC licence and
134 developed for anyone to use freely. If you would like to sponsor this
135 project, see:
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137 https://liberapay.com/WhyNotHugo/
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141 2022-06-20 darkman(1)