Unified Theming with Stylix

This repository uses Stylix to provide a unified, system-wide aesthetic across both NixOS (powerhouse) and macOS (turbine).

Overview

Stylix allows us to define a single source of truth for our system's visual identity, including:

• Color Scheme: Tokyo Night Dark
• Wallpaper: NixOS Dracula (master artwork)
• Fonts: Fira Code Nerd Font (Monospace), DejaVu (Sans/Serif)
• Cursor: Breeze Snow (24px)
• Opacity: 95% terminal transparency

Architecture

The styling configuration is centralized in modules/themes/stylix.nix.

Selective Targeting

To avoid conflicts with the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment (which is managed authoritatively via plasma-manager), Stylix is configured with autoEnable = false.

We selectively enable Stylix for specific, safe targets:

• System Level: Console and GTK.
• User Level: Starship and Ghostty (configured in users/brancengregory/home.nix).

Configuration

Global Settings (modules/themes/stylix.nix)

stylix = {
  enable = true;
  autoEnable = false; # Prevents interference with Plasma 6
  base16Scheme = "${pkgs.base16-schemes}/share/themes/tokyo-night-dark.yaml";
  
  image = pkgs.fetchurl {
    url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NixOS/nixos-artwork/master/wallpapers/nix-wallpaper-dracula.png";
    sha256 = "...";
  };

  fonts.monospace = {
    package = pkgs.nerd-fonts.fira-code;
    name = "FiraCode Nerd Font Mono";
  };
  
  # ... cursor and opacity settings
};

User Overrides (users/brancengregory/home.nix)

In the Home Manager profile, we explicitly enable Stylix for terminal tools:

stylix.targets = {
  starship.enable = true;
  ghostty.enable = true;
};

Changing the Theme

To change the entire system's look, you only need to modify modules/themes/stylix.nix. For example, to switch to Gruvbox:

1. Update base16Scheme to point to a gruvbox YAML file.
2. Update the image URL and hash to a matching wallpaper.
3. Run mise build-powerhouse or mise build-capacitor (or run nixos-rebuild switch on the target system) to apply changes.

Troubleshooting

Version Mismatches

If you see warnings about Stylix and NixOS/Home Manager version mismatches, they are suppressed using stylix.enableReleaseChecks = false in home-manager.sharedModules.

UI Artifacts

If a specific application looks broken with Stylix colors, you can disable theming for just that app in the targets block of either the system or user configuration.