reclr

reclr (short for recolor) is a simple POSIX shell script for managing color schemes.
It works with pywal templates and plain-text palettes, allowing you to reuse your existing templates to preview palettes and recolor your terminal, without requiring Python or extra dependencies.

---

Features

• Fast – applies palettes instantly
• Format – pywal templates and plain-text palettes
• Hackable – ~160 LOC of POSIX shell, easy to read and tweak

---

Why not pywal?

pywal is great for managing color schemes, but it's slow and bloated with features that not everyone needs, like wallpaper setting.
reclr follows the same concept but simplifies it by making it faster, easier to use, and fully implemented in POSIX shell.
It keeps pywal’s template format because it works well but uses a plain-text color scheme format instead of JSON, which is more complicated and unnecessary for most users.
Unlike pywal, reclr does not generate colors from wallpapers and only works with predefined palettes.

---

Performance

Tested in bash five times and averaged. reclr loads the same colorscheme faster than pywal despite pywal caching colorschemes.

time wal --theme petrichor
real    0m0.134s

time ./reclr -i petrichor  
real    0m0.041s

---

Setup Guide

git clone https://codeberg.org/oceanicc/reclr
cd reclr
./reclr -i palette

Requirements: POSIX-compliant shell

---

Usage

reclr [command]

Commands

• -i – load palette by name
• -t – custom template directory (optional)
• -o – custom output directory (optional)
• -l – list available palettes
• -p – preview current color palette
• -h – display help message

Examples

# Load a palette
reclr -i petrichor

# Load palette with custom template directory
reclr -i nord -t ~/dotfiles/templates

# List all available palettes
reclr -l

# Preview current colors
reclr -p

# Commands can also be chained
# Load a palette and preview it
reclr -i gruvbox -p

---

Palettes

Palettes live in ~/.config/reclr/palettes/ as simple key=value text files with a .txt extension. Values are passed in hex format. All standard keys (background, foreground, color0-color15) must be defined.

Example: petrichor.txt

background=#0E0E0E
foreground=#c7c9cc
cursor=#c7c9cc
color0=#0E0E0E
color1=#9c6b7a
color2=#899087
color3=#c4afa2
color4=#8d96bd
color5=#b694b6
color6=#86a3a6
color7=#c7c9cc
color8=#44444c
color9=#ae808f
color10=#949b92
color11=#e0cca8
color12=#9da4c8
color13=#d2aece
color14=#9cb9c0
color15=#c7c9cc

---

Templates

Templates use pywal-compatible placeholders and can be dropped in directly from your existing pywal setup (refer to the migrating from pywal section). Templates live in ~/.config/reclr/templates/.

Syntax: {variable} or {variable.modifier}

Variables

• {background}, {foreground}
• {color0}–{color15}

Modifiers

• .strip – hex without # (e.g: 282828)
• .rgb – comma-separated RGB (e.g: 40,40,40)

Example colors.conf.txt:

background = {background}
foreground = {foreground}
cursor = {color7.strip}ff
color0 = {color0.rgb}

For additional reference: pywal wiki

---

Applying Colors

Terminal sequences are automatically generated and applied when you load a palette. Add this to your shell rc file (.profile, .bashrc, .zshrc, etc.) to automatically load generated colors at startup:

[ -f ~/.cache/reclr/sequences ] && (cat ~/.cache/reclr/sequences)

---

Migrating from pywal

reclr is compatible with pywal's template syntax, you can drop in your existing pywal templates with minimal changes.

Template migration

• Copy your pywal templates into ~/.config/reclr/templates/
• Add .txt to their filenames (e.g.: colors.Xresources → colors.Xresources.txt)

Unsupported modifiers

Some modifiers used in pywal are not implemented in reclr as they are rarely used in templates. These can usually be replaced with .strip or .rgb as needed.

• .red, .green, .blue - float components
• .rgba, .xrgba - alpha channel formats

A patch adding support for these modifiers may be available in the future.

Converting pywal color schemes

reclr does not use pywal’s JSON color scheme files directly, but you can easily convert them to plain-text palettes using this command:

# Convert all .json colorschemes in the current directory to .txt palettes
for f in *.json; do
    name=$(basename "$f" .json)
    grep -oE '"(background|foreground|color[0-9]+)":\s*"#[0-9a-fA-F]+"' "$f" |       
        sed 's/"//g;s/:\s*/=/' > "$name.txt"
done

Each .json file will produce a plain-text .txt palette containing all standard color keys supported by reclr.

Unsupported colorscheme definitions

reclr ignores non-color fields in pywal’s .json files such as checksum, wallpaper, and alpha.
The cursor color is optional but can be added manually for template compatibility.

---

Credits

Inspired by pywal with code style from kiss.

License

MIT