Theming

lensos-theme switches the whole desktop between themes in one step, wallpaper included.

On Linux, a desktop’s look is spread across a dozen config files in a dozen formats. lensOS keeps one palette per theme and writes all of them from it: switching themes restyles everything at once.

lensos-theme

Press Super + T (or open Themes from the dock, or right-click the panel’s lensOS button) and pick a theme. It recolours, live:

the panel and its pills
the dock
the app launcher and power menu
the terminal, including the prompt and the system summary
notifications
window borders and the right-click menu
apps: Files, the text editor, dialogs and other GTK apps, GTK 4 apps, Qt apps (through GTK) and lensOS Settings take the theme’s backgrounds and accent (apps you open next)
the wallpaper, rendered in each theme’s own colours

theme	colours
`lensos`	blue glass, the default
`rose-noir`	black plum and pink
`snowy`	ink navy, paper cream and ochre gold

From a terminal:

lensos-theme list            # * marks the current theme
lensos-theme apply snowy

Colours from your wallpaper

Settings → Appearance → Match my wallpaper looks at the picture on your desktop and picks three accent colours that suit it, for the bar, dock, terminal and the rest. Choose your own picture there first, or keep the theme’s.

Your own wallpaper

ln -sf ~/Pictures/mine.jpg ~/.config/lensos/wallpaper
lensos-theme apply "$(lensos-theme current)"

Remove the link to go back to the theme’s wallpaper.

Your own theme

A theme is one small file. Copy one and change the colours:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/lensos/themes
cp /usr/share/lensos/themes/lensos.theme ~/.local/share/lensos/themes/mine.theme
nano ~/.local/share/lensos/themes/mine.theme      # name, description, colours
lensos-theme apply mine

key	used for
`accent`, `accent2`, `accent3`	highlights, icons, the prompt; the three lights in the wallpaper
`bg`, `surface`, `border`	panel pills, menus, notifications, window frames
`fg`, `muted`, `urgent`	text, secondary text, warnings
`color0` to `color15`	the terminal’s 16 colours
`wall_bg`	the wallpaper’s background

Put a mine.jpg next to it to give it a wallpaper. The files a theme fills in are templates in /usr/share/lensos/theme-templates.

Your own config edits are safe: the panel, terminal, launcher and notifications read their colours from separate generated files in ~/.config/lensos/theme, so switching themes never touches the files you edit.

Effects

lensOS’s compositor (picom) adds blur, rounded corners, shadows and quick open, close and resize animations. On computers where OpenGL runs in software (virtual machines, or no GPU driver yet) it switches to a lighter mode on its own: no blur and no translucent terminal, the rest stays. Settings → Effects turns each of them on or off, sets the corner radius and the drawing method, and can switch the compositor off entirely.

Like all lensOS artwork, the themes are licensed CC-BY-SA-4.0: fork them and share your own.