Ash for the desktop: an Omarchy theme set derived from Harbor

Why this post exists#

The Ash palette already runs this blog, the Trilium app and my Gitea instance (see Inside this blog). The one surface still missing was the desktop itself — I run Omarchy (Arch Linux + Hyprland), so the theme set now covers that too. This post documents the repo and the small wallpaper tool that comes with it.

Repo: zink/omarchy-ash-theme

The palette#

Ash is a warm-neutral palette: Gruvbox hues, cooled and desaturated toward a grey/ash look — bone text on soot panels, ember accents. The light variant is ink on ash-paper. Both variants exist as Omarchy themes.

Role	Ash Dark	Ash Light
Background	void `#100f12`, panel `#1c1b1f`, raised `#29282c`	paper `#e9e3d5`, raised `#f2ecdf`
Foreground	bone `#e6dfd1`, chalk `#f3ede1`	ink `#2a2822`
Muted / border	ash `#6d6a63`, border `#3a383d`	muted `#6f685c`, border `#c9c1ad`
Accents	ember `#e0914f`, gold `#d6b46a`, blood `#c15c46`, steel `#7c9aa1`, moss `#8f9a5c`, violet `#a585ac`	ember `#a85f1d`, gold `#8a6a24`, blood `#96392a`, steel `#3d6b72`, moss `#5c6631`, violet `#6a4c72`

Generating the theme set#

An Omarchy theme is a folder of per-app configs — waybar, hyprland, btop, terminals, editors and more, roughly 30 files per variant. Writing those twice by hand is not my idea of fun, so the set is derived from the excellent Harbor / Harbor Dark themes (MIT, © HANCORE) with a script:

tools/recolor.py applies an explicit Harbor→Ash color map for every named role, plus a nearest-color fallback for anything unmapped.
It handles all color notations the configs use: #hex, #rrggbbaa, rgba(r, g, b, a) and Hyprland's rgb()/rgba() hex wrappers.
Branding is renamed throughout (harbor* → ash*, including file names), and the light variant gets its light.mode marker and Yaru icon-theme settings.

If the palette ever changes (it is maintained as CSS in zink/trilium-themes), one command regenerates the whole tree:

python3 tools/recolor.py .

On the desktop#

Both variants in action — dark first, then light:

Wallpapers from your own photos#

Photos rarely match a theme palette by themselves, so the repo also contains tools/ash-wallpaper.sh: an ImageMagick script that reduces any photo to Ash-tinted greys and selectively keeps warm highlights (sunset, fire, lamps, skin tones) in the ember/gold range — a selective-color, "Pleasantville" effect that blends into the desktop's palette instead of fighting it.

Rough pipeline: desaturate → rebuild the grey ramp from the palette's darkest/lightest colors → compute a mask from a hue band plus a saturation gate → boost and colorize the masked parts → composite and posterize.

tools/ash-wallpaper.sh photo.jpg          # -> photo-ash.png

Before:

After:

The limits, honestly#

The mask is hue-based, not semantic — so it shines on neutral subjects with a small warm light source, and struggles on scenes dominated by warm colors. This fireworks shot keeps ~96 % of its pixels classified as "warm"; the result stays close to the original:

Before:

After:

Good results need some parameter tinkering (hue band, saturation gate, boost). The full guide — parameter reference, ready-made recipes and measured mask coverage for ten different test photos — lives in tools/ash-wallpaper.md in the repo.

Install#

mkdir -p ~/.config/omarchy/themes
cp -r ash-dark ash-light ~/.config/omarchy/themes/
omarchy-theme-set ash-dark

One caveat: omarchy-theme-install distinguishes installed themes by the presence of a .git folder and filters some files — on my machine that dropped the terminal configs, so I copy (or symlink) the folders directly.

Status#

The dark variant is in daily use; the light variant renders correctly and gets occasional test drives. Next up: a light-aware version of the wallpaper tool (the current one is dark-only — an early light variant looked inverted on photos and was dropped) and a few more palette-locked wallpaper recipes.

License#

MIT — the upstream Harbor license is retained in the repo.