System Theme

[barrettruth]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Problem

automatically enable/disable recolor (dark mode) based on the system-wide light/dark preference. This is a commonplace feature in many apps from chrome to ghostty to codex. People care about this existing generally.

zathura already has everything needed to display documents in "dark mode" and the only missing piece is reacting to the system preference.

this can be worked around as follows, of course:

for pid in $(pidof zathura); do
  busctl --user call org.pwmt.zathura.PID-$pid /org/pwmt/zathura \
    org.pwmt.zathura ExecuteCommand s "set recolor true"
done

Expected behavior

Add a boolean option, e.g. recolor-follow-system (default false) that subscribes to the XDG desktop portal and listens to its SettingChanged signal.

This portal approach is desktop-agnostic (GNOME, KDE, etc.) and is the same signal GTK4/libadwaita uses internally. Also, zathura already uses GDBus.

I am willing to work on this.

Thanks for the great software!

[aanthoonyy]

I'll take it if you don't want it. I'll put the pr up once my current one merges.

[barrettruth]

I'd like to write the PR but want to wait for a response here first :)

[sebastinas]

I think only looking at the recolor options is a bit too limited. The default theme is more on the darkish side and we do not have a light theme. So if we start following the system theme, there is more to be done than only recolor.