Theme Switcher

Browse saved themes in a carousel and apply palette, wallpaper, and templates to the shell in one click. Each theme bundles a palette source (built-in, wallpaper, community, or custom), the wallpaper that goes with it, a preview screenshot, and a title.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	theblackdon/theme-switcher
Entries	Shortcut: open; shortcut: wallpaper; shortcut: random; bar widget: theme-switcher; panel: carousel; panel: editor; panel: wallpapers; panel: wallpaper-picker; service: wallpaper-ipc

Usage

1. Enable the plugin in Settings → Plugins.

2. Add a Theme Switcher bar widget, a control center shortcut, or run:

   noctalia msg panel-toggle theblackdon/theme-switcher:carousel
   

3. In the carousel, click a theme card to apply it immediately (palette source + selection, wallpaper, and templates). Use the pencil button on a card to edit it, the plus button to add a new one.

4. The editor lets you pick a palette source (built-in, wallpaper, community, or custom), the matching palette or generator scheme, one or more wallpapers, a screenshot path (including a "Capture desktop" helper), and a title. Use the Browse button to open the multi-select wallpaper picker and add several images at once. Open the editor directly with:

   noctalia msg panel-toggle theblackdon/theme-switcher:editor
   

5. The wallpaper shortcut opens the wallpapers panel, which lets you browse and switch the wallpapers of the currently applied theme without re-applying the palette. The Add wallpaper button opens a multi-select thumbnail picker (paged, with a name filter and select all/clear) and appends every checked image at once. It browses the shell's wallpaper folder and generates small thumbnails in the background, so even a folder of hundreds of large wallpapers stays responsive. Open the panel with:

   noctalia msg panel-toggle theblackdon/theme-switcher:wallpapers
   

   The picker can also be opened directly with noctalia msg panel-toggle theblackdon/theme-switcher:wallpaper-picker.

6. The random shortcut applies a random wallpaper from the currently applied theme with a single click.

Keyboard bindings

Wallpaper switching is reachable over IPC via the always-running wallpaper-ipc service, so you can bind these to keys as KWin/KineticWE custom shortcuts (Command/URL action):

noctalia-kwe msg plugin theblackdon/theme-switcher:wallpaper-ipc all random
noctalia-kwe msg plugin theblackdon/theme-switcher:wallpaper-ipc all next
noctalia-kwe msg plugin theblackdon/theme-switcher:wallpaper-ipc all apply "Rose Pine"
noctalia-kwe msg panel-toggle theblackdon/theme-switcher:carousel
noctalia-kwe msg panel-toggle theblackdon/theme-switcher:wallpapers
noctalia-kwe msg panel-toggle theblackdon/theme-switcher:wallpaper-picker
noctalia-kwe msg panel-toggle theblackdon/theme-switcher:editor

Use :wallpaper-ipc for random/next/apply. Dispatching to the :wallpapers panel only works while that panel is open; a service is always ready.

apply takes a theme id (the slug of its title, e.g. rose-pine) or its title ("Rose Pine"), case-insensitively. Partial matches work when unambiguous.

Use noctalia instead of noctalia-kwe if that is the binary name on your system.

How a theme is applied

Applying a theme sets the active wallpaper first, then runs noctalia msg color-scheme-set <source> <palette> to switch the palette, and finally noctalia msg templates-apply to re-render the configured templates. A theme can hold several wallpapers; the active one is selected in the walls panel.

Screenshots

Carousel	Editor	Wallpapers

Notes

• Community palettes are listed from the Noctalia palette catalog over HTTP, with an offline fallback to the plugin's cached copy and the shell's community-palette cache.
• Custom palettes are read from ~/.config/noctalia/palettes/*.json.
• Themes are stored in the plugin's data directory (themes.json).
• Picker thumbnails are generated in the background with the first available tool (magick, convert, vipsthumbnail, or ffmpeg) and cached under the plugin data dir. If none is installed, the picker falls back to a filename checklist.