Help creating a simple script?

Scotty-Trees

Greetings fellow Linux connoisseur,

I'd like to make a simple script for Hexchat. You see, it's still GTK2, and pretty much everything else I use is GTK3, so when I switch from a light to a dark theme once night time hits, all my applications change to dark, but Hexchat only half changes. Now to make Hexchat go full dark the way nature intended, I had to edit a copy of Hexchats color.conf file to make it dark themed all around. I also have another copy of that color.conf file, but edited for a light theme version. So essentially, I have to replace the light theme color.conf file with the dark theme color.conf file each time my theme changes from light to dark during sunrise and sunset, so long as I want to keep some consistency with my system.

The way I maintain this now is, I go to my backups folder where I keep copies of the light and dark themed Hexchat color.conf files that I edited and then I have to track down Hexchats .config folder deep within the hidden folders of the Nautilus realm, and I replace whatever the current color.conf file is at the time, with the theme I want to replace it with and badabing badaboom, once I close and reopen Hexchat, I've got the theme working and styling to be more system compliant, which by all accounts makes me one happy user.

My question really is does anyone know where to point me to make a script like this possible instead of me having to go into the folders each time and manually change it? It's not the worst thing in the world to manually change it, but if I can automate the process with a script that runs every night at 8:00PM or something, that would be more than ideal. Something like a script saying, hey at 8:00PM, file colors.conf located in home/Documents/Backups/Hexchat/dark-theme/colors.conf make a copy and replace colors.conf file located in home/.config/Hexchat and then another script at 8:00AM run automatically saying something similar, but going from a dark to light theme like, home/Documents/Backups/Hexchat/light-theme/colors.conf make a copy and replace colors.conf file located in home/.config/Hexchat

If anyone knows how to write a script like that, that would be perfect! If not no worries, if anyone could perhaps point me in the direction of an easy to understand tutorial that would help make this happen, I'd also appreciate that as well, thank you very much.

DrunkenAlcoholic

Actually many ways to do this, the basic and easiest is using cron jobs, however.... thinking outside of just getting the job done, you need to consider if at some point you didn't have your computer turned on at 8pm or 8am, will this mean it wont change as it missed the time slot? while this can be scripted by doing some time stamp checking and having this script run at startup this could over come that issue. My thought would be a python script that runs as a threaded daemon, python is fairly simple to write and running as a daemon means a thread could monitor the time stamp of the colors.conf to ensure it always has the correct config even when the computer was turned off during the 8am-8pm time slot, as this would be time stamped checked at bootup. I have written my own little scripts like this, most recently a script for when Gamemode was enable and disabled, take a look here at below link for this python script for ideas, it doesn't need to be as big as this script but you get the idea

https://gitlab.com/DrunkenAlcoholic/gamemode-status

DrunkenAlcoholic

I thought I should have included a quick description on how you could possibly use a cron job to achieve this in the most basic way.
first create a new crontab
crontab -e

then add your "every day at 20:00 and 08:00"

* 20 * * * cp ~/Documents/Backups/Hexchat/dark-theme/colors.conf ~/.config/Hexchat/colors.conf
* 8 * * * cp ~/Documents/Backups/Hexchat/light-theme/colors.conf ~/.config/Hexchat/colors.conf`

The above not tested but gives an idea how crontabs could be used.

//EDIT
you might need to replace

~/

with full path e.g "/home/username/" can't remember if crontab works with user account paths or not.

CorvusRuber

DrunkenAlcoholic
You know that Solus doesn't use cron but systemd timers, right ?

DrunkenAlcoholic

CorvusRuber My bad, I have been on a different OS for the last 6 months and didn't think if Solus used cron or not. I don't recall having the need to use systemd timer or not, or it was a very long time ago, so maybe you could show Scotty-Trees how to use systemd timer for what he needs to do.

@Scotty-Trees
Maybe read through the Archwiki about systemd timer to help set your self up
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Timers

CorvusRuber

Should be something like this (YMMV, this come straight out of memory and I haven't written a timer in a while)

[Unit]
Description=Run foo every day at 20:00

[Timer]
OnCalendar=daily 20:00
Persistent=true

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart= path_to_your_script_goes_here

all in a file $whatever.timer in systemd timer directory.
Google, as always in this things, is your good and faithful friend.

Girtablulu

CorvusRuber yep woulde be the way I would do it, but additionaly I'd check if the base script which does all of these changes uses a systemd timer/service where you could hook up your own script

JoshStrobl

I've actually tinkered with this stuff before as well, but for me I went with (in my opinion) a more straightforward approach.

I just wrote a bash script that toggles themes and states depending on Budgie's 'dark-theme' setting. So if I wanted dark mode, I'd check what the value of gsettings get com.solus-project.budgie-panel 'dark-theme', check if it was true or false, and set various values including org.gnome.desktop.interface.

Can also do that with toggling on Mutter's built-in Night Mode via gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.color 'night-light-enabled' true/false.

Then I just set up a keybind via GNOME Control Center to run the script when I press the keyboard shortcut. Less fuss for me personally compared to it being time-based, since my sleeping schedule has rarely been consistent, so my day sometimes may very well not be day at all.

#! /bin/bash

setVSTheme() {
	sed -i "s/$1/$2/g" $HOME/.config/Code\ -\ OSS/User/settings.json
}

budgieDarkThemeVal=$(gsettings get com.solus-project.budgie-panel 'dark-theme')
vsDarkTheme="Ayu Mirage Bordered"
vsLightTheme="Ayu Light Bordered"

if [[ "$budgieDarkThemeVal" == "true" ]]; then # If currently dark theme, swap to the light
	gsettings set com.solus-project.budgie-panel 'dark-theme' false
	gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface 'gtk-theme' 'Plata'
	gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.color 'night-light-enabled' false
	setVSTheme "${vsDarkTheme}" "${vsLightTheme}"
else
	gsettings set com.solus-project.budgie-panel 'dark-theme' true
	gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface 'gtk-theme' 'Plata-Noir'
	gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.color 'night-light-enabled' true
	setVSTheme "${vsLightTheme}" "${vsDarkTheme}"
fi

Harvey

I am not much of a programmer but this should work.

This way you do not need cron / systemd timers or a keybind, can't miss a trigger and it tracks what theme it set it to last reducing repeated overwriting of the conf for no reason (active session only). Just make sure you make the script executable first chmod +x scriptname.sh set a autostart command to /path/to/script/scriptname.sh &

TIME is 24h time with no separators so hhmmss. So currently the dark theme will be set between the hours of 8PM - 8AM. It will check time / theme set every 10 seconds, you change this by modifying the lines sleep 10 to whatever interval you want.

#!/bin/bash
THEME=nfi

SetDark() {
    if [ $THEME != dark ]; then
        # Setting Dark theme
        cp ~/Documents/Backups/Hexchat/dark-theme/colors.conf ~/.config/hexchat/colors.conf
        THEME=dark
    else
        # Theme is already dark so do nothing this loop
        :
    fi
}

SetLight() {
    if [ $THEME != light ]; then
        # Setting Light theme
        cp ~/Documents/Backups/Hexchat/light-theme/colors.conf ~/.config/hexchat/colors.conf
        THEME=light
    else
        # Theme is already light so do nothing this loop
        :
    fi
}

while true; do
    TIME=$(timedatectl | head -n 1 | awk '{print $5}' | sed s/://g) 
    if [ $TIME -ge 200000 ] || [ $TIME -lt 080000 ]; then
        SetDark
        sleep 10
    else
        SetLight
        sleep 10
    fi
done

leapfog

If I understand correctly, you have to restart hexchat to make it aware of the modified configuration. In that case I would simply write a wrapper script to first link the matching config and than start hexchat. Instead of using cron or other timer based mechanisms.