Themes and wallpapers
A theme in W is one palette that the system renders onto every surface: the Hyprland UI, the Quickshell shell, GTK and Qt applications, the terminal, GRUB, Plymouth, the login greeter. Switching a theme re-skins all of them at once — down to the colour of the boot logo — with a live crossfade.
Switching themes
Hub → Appearance lists installed themes with wallpaper previews. Clicking a
theme switches it for your user; a system-wide change is done from the CLI by
an administrator (w-theme set <name> with privileges). The list has two
sections: System themes and My themes (per-user, created by you).
From a terminal: w-theme list and w-theme set <name>.
Creating a theme from a wallpaper
Hub → Appearance → Add (or w-theme new in a terminal) builds a theme out
of an image:
- Pick a wallpaper image and a name, choose Dark or Light.
- W extracts the dominant colors from the image and builds an accessible palette around the base color you pick — contrast is checked automatically so text stays readable in both modes.
- Choose an intensity (low/medium/high) for the palette ramp and confirm.
Light themes get special care: ink colors are recalculated against the light surfaces, so buttons and icons keep their contrast.
The same screen, opened with the pencil badge on one of your generated themes, rebuilds that theme from its own wallpaper (new base color, new contrast) — the wallpaper itself does not change.
Wallpapers are per-resolution images in a small set of size tiers; a theme
ships what it ships and the system falls back to the nearest size. See
w-wallpaper if you maintain a theme's assets.
The Appearance panel
- Themes tab — the theme grids above, plus creating and removing themes.
- Bar tab — which bar blocks are shown, per monitor (see
w-bar). - Settings tab — backdrop blur and animation toggles, and the bar position.
Theming from the CLI
w-style renders the theme onto each subsystem, w-theme manages which theme
is active and what exists, w-wallpaper manages the wallpaper files. For
hands-on maintenance (for example after editing a system theme by hand):
w-style apply re-renders, w-reset all returns the W defaults.