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UX issues regarding editing default omarchy theme #96
Description
Hi, I really appreciate your work and sorry if that "issue" is not really appropriate here, you can just close it if you don't find it to be an issue. So it's more like a feedback with suggestions.
I tried to change system's theme background image and encountered UX inconveniences regarding:
- Editing existing omarchy preconfigured themes and applying them.
- Changing only background in a currently applied theme without changing any colors.
And I would like to point them out, maybe it will help.
Edit a preconfigured theme
For example I want to change some specific color in my existing system-default ristretto theme or just to add or change it's primary and additional background images.
My actions are:
- Navigate to
System Themes - Find
ristrettotheme and clickApplyto apply this omarchy theme. Everything seems smooth so far. - And the problems are about to start. I click
Editonristrettotheme to tweak it:- No additional images fetched from the ristretto theme
- Colors are extracted directly from the image and not from the theme I'm editing.
And because of that, if I click edit on ristretto theme and click apply, the applied theme will be drastically different from the system's one.
Because EXTRACTION MODE is set on Auto Detect and the colors with additional background images are not fetched from the system theme we're editing.
And I was expecting it to use the same colors the system theme is using and to tweak only some parts of the theme.
I know I can select ristretto preset in PRESETS section, but the result is still very different from the system's theme. For example
- Btop theme becomes completely different
- GTK theme icons not match original system theme (they become blue instead).
There are also minor issues like the fact that the theme is not applied to gtk file picker but it's minor and just to be polished in the future.
Change background image as a separate feature
I believe there was such feature in previous version, but once I've updated the app I lost it. Seems like I currently can't just change background image without editing the whole theme and messing with colors.
So it would be really helpful to have such feature to only change current background images set.
Activity
bjarneo commentedon Apr 20, 2026
It does not extract the color from the image when you edit it, it will use the colors.toml palette. However, when you apply it, it will use the aether templates. This is what you notice since it switches. Aether do not have support to edit external themes. It can just import their colors (colors.toml).
Fair, this should be fixed.
Yes, this is not added. Quite a lot of GTK styling is not added, and I am not sure about how much time I will spend doing this either. Solid PRs are always welcome :)
Have you tried the latest version?
Overall, I don't think Aether works how you expect it to work. By design.
4nonch commentedon Apr 23, 2026
Thanks for your reply! You made some things more clear.
Got it. It's indeed utilize colors.toml first time, but probably colors.toml does not match the ristretto theme. If that's the case, then OK, just a minor issue with color mismatch and nothing wrong with the logic itself.
I've just updated Omarchy and tried 4.13 Aether version. And I still can't find the way to update only the background image without editing and applying the whole theme. Maybe I'm just blind...
I've just recorded the whole struggle regarding background images, would be great if you point out my mistakes:
out.mp4
4nonch commentedon May 3, 2026
Alright, I won't bother. Thank you for your work!
bjarneo commentedon May 3, 2026
I haven't had time to come back to this yet!
bjarneo commentedon Sep 15, 2026
The wallpaper-only action now calls the public Omarchy background command and preserves the active theme. System themes use an Import action that loads colors, icons, and all wallpapers into the editor. Aether protects foreign theme folders from replacement. These fixes are on main through #125. The latest published release remains v4.29.8.
Add source-preserving wallpaper variants