# yazi-gruvbox

A [Gruvbox Dark](https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox) `theme.toml` for
[Yazi](https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi) — including the **icon table**, so the
devicons in front of your files stop looking like a paint spill on an otherwise
muted colour scheme.

Written against **Yazi 26.9**. It uses the current schema (`[mgr]`, `[tabs]`,
`[pick]`, `[cmp]`, `[indicator]`, …), not the pre-25.x one — older Gruvbox
themes floating around still use `[manager]` and `[select]` and will throw
errors on a current Yazi.

## What it covers

Panel chrome, status bar, tabs, mode indicator, which-key, confirm/spot/notify
popups, picker, input, completion, task manager, help — plus:

**File and directory names** (`[filetype]`):

| | |
|---|---|
| directories | `#83a598` blue |
| regular files | `#ebdbb2` fg1 |
| executables | `#b8bb26` green |
| archives | `#fe8019` orange |
| images | `#fabd2f` yellow |
| audio / video | `#d3869b` purple |
| PDF / doc | `#8ec07c` aqua |
| orphan symlinks | red background |

**Icons** (`[icon]`): all 725 entries of Yazi's preset table, every glyph colour
remapped to its nearest Gruvbox tone.

**Syntax highlighting** (`gruvbox-dark.tmTheme`): 39 scope rules for the file
preview, written from scratch against
[morhetz/gruvbox](https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox)'s own vim highlight links
— comments gray italic, strings green, constants purple, keywords red,
identifiers blue, functions green bold, types yellow, preprocessor aqua,
operators plain foreground.

## How the icon colours were derived

Yazi's preset ships 725 icon entries using 221 distinct colours from the
nvim-tree/devicons palette — saturated web colours that clash badly with
Gruvbox's muted ground.

`regen-icons.py` maps each of them onto the Gruvbox palette:

- **Nearest neighbour in Oklab**, so the match is perceptual rather than a naive
  RGB distance.
- **Lightness weighted down (0.7)** in the distance metric, so *hue* drives the
  result. Docker blue stays blue, Ruby red stays red, instead of everything
  collapsing toward whatever tone happens to be equally bright.
- **Chromatic and greyish sources are matched from separate pools** (split at
  Oklab chroma 0.04). Without that split a vivid magenta can land on grey, and
  white can land on orange.
- **Low-contrast targets are excluded.** `#cc241d` (2.69:1) and `#7c6f64`
  (3.03:1) on `#282828` were dropped from the target palette — icons are
  non-text, so 3:1 is the bar. The dimmest icon now sits at **3.48:1**.

221 colours end up on 19 Gruvbox tones. Icons stay colourful and stay
distinguishable; they just stop shouting.

## Install

```sh
git clone https://git.opennerds.org/templis/yazi-gruvbox
cp yazi-gruvbox/theme.toml yazi-gruvbox/gruvbox-dark.tmTheme ~/.config/yazi/
```

`theme.toml` overrides Yazi's built-in `theme-dark.toml`; anything it does not
set keeps the default.

Both files are needed — `theme.toml` points at the `.tmTheme` for syntax
highlighting in file previews.

## Sharper previews (optional)

Not part of the colour scheme, but it belongs in the same corner of
`~/.config/yazi` — the files are under `preview/`.

```sh
cp preview/yazi.toml ~/.config/yazi/yazi.toml
cp -r preview/plugins/pdf-hidpi.yazi ~/.config/yazi/plugins/
ya cache clear
```

### Why PDFs look mushy by default

Two bottlenecks stack up:

1. Yazi calls `pdftoppm` **without `-r`**, so pages render at poppler's 150 DPI
   default — an A4 page is 1241x1754 px.
2. `[preview] max_width` / `max_height` default to **600x900**. The page is
   squeezed to 600 px wide and then scaled back up to fill the pane.

On top of that the page is JPEG-compressed at quality 75, which smears glyph
edges.

`preview/yazi.toml` raises the cap to 1600x2400, and the `pdf-hidpi` plugin is
Yazi's own PDF previewer with two changes: `-r 300` and PNG instead of JPEG.
The page now renders at 2481x3508 and is downscaled into the cap, so the result
is supersampled rather than upscaled — and lossless where the glyphs are.

**Both the previewer and the preloader must be overridden.** They write the
same cache file, so replacing only one leaves the 150 DPI version in place.
`preview/yazi.toml` does both.

Yazi has no zoom. What it has is `J` / `K`, which turn PDF pages in the
preview, and whatever key you bound to maximise the preview pane.

### Videos

The video preview is **one still frame** by design: `ffmpeg` pulls a keyframe
at 5 % of the runtime and Yazi shows it as an image. Nothing animates, and no
setting changes that.

What does work:

| Key | |
|---|---|
| `J` / `K` | scrub the preview through the file, ±5 % per press |
| `Tab` | spot panel — codec, resolution, duration |
| `Enter` / `o` | open in an mpv window |
| `O` | pick an opener — including **Play here (Kitty)** |

The last one is the `[opener]` block in `preview/yazi.toml`: it runs
`mpv --vo=kitty --vo-kitty-use-shm=yes`, which draws the video into the
terminal pane through the Kitty graphics protocol. Yazi blocks until mpv
exits (`q`). Shared-memory transfer keeps it watchable; without it every frame
goes through the tty as base64 and it crawls. It is still a terminal doing a
framebuffer's job — fine for checking what a clip is, not for watching it.

Defining `play` replaces Yazi's preset list rather than merging into it, which
is why mpv appears twice there: once windowed, once inline.

## Keeping the icon table current

The `[icon]` block **replaces** Yazi's preset table wholesale. Icons added by
later Yazi releases will not show up until it is regenerated:

```sh
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi
awk '/^\[icon\]/{f=1} f' yazi/yazi-config/preset/theme-dark.toml > icons-src.toml
./regen-icons.py icons-src.toml      # writes icon-gruvbox.toml
```

Then replace the `[icon]` block in `theme.toml` with the generated file. The
script prints which Gruvbox tone each source colour landed on.

`regen-tmtheme.py` does the same for `gruvbox-dark.tmTheme` — edit the palette
or the scope rules at the top of the script and re-run it.

Both generators and the `pdf-hidpi` plugin target the **26.9** plugin API. If
you build against Yazi's `main` branch instead of the tag you run, you will hit
renamed functions — `fs.cha()` was `fs.stat()` on main — and the error only
surfaces at preview time.

## Self-contained

Everything needed is in this repository — nothing has to be fetched from a
third-party theme repo, and no file here carries a copyleft licence.

## Licence

MIT — see `LICENSE`. The `.tmTheme` is original work; the derived icon data is
MIT as well. Notices in `THIRD-PARTY.md`.