Omarchy (micro) forks Chromium!

One of the really cool things about Umachi is that our theme updator updates all the apps or most of them at least right away. But we were really missing a key app, Chrome. You can theme Chrome to your own colors, but it is a manual process. If you want it to apply to all windows that are already open, or if you want to do it through the command line, you have to close all the windows and open them back up. Neither of those solutions really work very well when you're trying to make it smooth and quick to jump between themes in omachi. So about four days ago, I put out a bounty on X. I said, "We've had a bunch of people look at this and we haven't been able to find a way to do it with existing tools. Some people suggested you could install extensions or you could do all sorts of stuff." And I just thought, you know what, this doesn't make any sense. Chrome already has the ability to do what we want. It's just a manual process that requires you to go into settings, appearance, GTK, theming, and then change your colors. I want to change it whenever we're changing the theme. I want it to be automatic. I want it to apply to all windows that are already open. Chromium didn't have that in the package. So, I put this bounty out and I said, I will pay $5,000. Well, not me technically. I will have 37 signals pay $5,000 to the first person who can make this possible and get it into a released version of Chromium. Well, we had someone raise their hand and said, "Hey, do you know what? I think I know how to do that." That is Helmud Yanuka, and he's a contributor to Chromium. I think he has a few hundred commits that have gone into the codebase. He reached out to me and said, "I think I know how to do this." And you know what? There was a bunch of people who reached out and a lot of people had good ideas. A lot of people had suggestions, but not a lot of people had the insight, the experience, and essentially the CV to be able to do this. So, when I saw the helmet reached out and he was sort of actually already working on it, I got really excited. And that was four days ago. And you know what? Today we have a micro fork of Chromium called Omachi-Chromium-BIN that lives on the AUI that has just this little new capability inside of it where you can use the CLI, you can use the terminal to change the color of Chrome and have it apply right away to everything. And the next version of Omachi is obviously going to use this micro fork of Chromium. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, are you crazy? Why are you making a fork? Chromium is this huge project. And take it easy. First of all, we're making a micro fork. We have this little patch that goes into the existing build pipeline of how this stuff is already set up. We're not sort of signing up for maintaining a longun Chromium fork. The plan all along, the bounty all along was that this feature has to get in upstream, but that might take a while. Who knows how long it is going to be or whether it's even going to be h happening. Chromium obviously have their own opinions on what goes in or not. We hope to convince them that this is a good idea. I have actually already reached out to some folks at Google on the Chromium project and it seemed like they were willing to listen to the proposal at least and I hope it's going to go through. I think it will. But in the meantime, this is the magic of open source. And in fact, this is also kind of the magic of Arch. It is the magic of the AUR that we can make this micro fork. We can put it into a package and we can push it up on the AUR and the next version of Amachi can just switch over and it's going to be like nothing happened. Now, the other objection I assure you someone will have is, well, how you going to keep this up to date? We're setting up a build server that's going to build this every night. That's going to make sure that any security releases to Chromium is instantly incorporated into the Chromium or to the Yumachi-Chromium done bit package and everything's going to be pushed up. So, we're essentially staying on Chromium. Nothing much is really changing. There's just a light slight little patch that's getting applied to the codebase and we're building our own version of it. And isn't that magical? Isn't it magical that open source actually means open source? that if there's something in the codebase that you want to change, you can just do it. You can just do things. You can just say like, here's my little patch. I'm going to apply it to upstream. I'm going to own that micro fork. Yes, that's a bit of a hassle, but incredible that this is even possible. Even more incredible that I didn't even think I don't know how to do this four days ago. And a contributor from X just got in touch. We made it happen. I reached out to some folks at Google. They were receptive to the idea and until we see where that goes, we have something that can just roll. It's pretty sweet. Got to say we are working on doing the same thing for Neoim such that theme place or or theme changes immediately apply there as well. And we will basically have all the key components, all the key applications automatically update their color scheme whenever you're changing your theme in um it just makes the whole thing nicer. Is it required? No. Does it enable you to do more whatever productivity blah blah blah? No. It's just nice. It's just nice. It's pleasurable. It's a satisfaction to see that this just looks great. It looks great right away. And then we can make things happen. This is our own computer. This is our own operating system. This is our own environment. And if there's something we don't like, no matter where it is in the stack, we can damn well change it. So, let me show you how it actually looks. Okay, so here I am in Omachi running the default Tokyo night theme. It's got these nice dark purples and everything is already integrated. You can see Chromian on the left has the colors. The elacrity terminal has the colors and BTU has the colors. Now, if I hop to super control shift plus space, that's the immediate jump to changing a theme. I can pick another theme. One of my favorites of late is Osaka Jade. It's a nice deep green theme. And as you can see, as soon as I change over, Chromium changes with it. If I hop back in and go to Nord, you can see all the theme colors match super nice for that. It even matches well with the light themes like Cappuccin Latte. Got a nice cool even gray on the back of that. We have another one down here. Rose pine, which gets you a lavender purple on the back and everything is lined up. If I hop back here to Tokyo Night, you see we're back to where we started. And of course, there are a ton of extra themes for Umachi. Not all of them will be updated with this feature out the gate. So, if I switch to one of those, like Gold Rush, you'll just see it's going to use kind of a neutral grayish. And as soon as the theme is updated, you can hop into the Omachi menu and then go down to update and then go down to themes and it's going to pull down any updates to any of the extra themes that you have installed. And if they have the Chromium theme update, you're good to go. So, this is just another way we're making Umachi beautiful and consistent. I hope you like it.

How about them matching themes, eh?