A near-black GTK 3 / GTK 4 and xfwm4 theme, built from the Darkmatter WezTerm

color scheme. Forked from [Nordic](https://github.com/EliverLara/Nordic), whose

widget stylesheets it keeps almost verbatim — what changed is the palette, the

window decorations, and the parts of Nordic's derivations that assumed a

mid-dark base rather than a near-black one.

## Palette

The terminal scheme gives a background, a foreground, a selection color and

three accents. A GTK theme needs more surface levels than a terminal does, so

the intermediate steps are filled in; everything else is taken verbatim. The

chrome — headerbars, panels and the xfwm4 frame — sits at the window

background level rather than below it, so a window reads as one surface with

only its shadow and borders separating it from the desktop.

The accent drives selection, focus rings, switches, checkboxes, progress bars,

links and suggested actions.

There is no red in the terminal scheme, and errors need one. `#e75353` is the

accent rotated to a red hue at identical saturation and lightness, so it reads

as a sibling of the accent rather than an import from another palette.

Nordic spread its UI roles across six hues. Darkmatter has three, so several

roles collapse: the blues and cyans that upstream used for selection all land

on the accent, and its greens land on the teal.

## What's here

- `gtk-3.0/` — GTK 3 stylesheet

- `gtk-4.0/` — GTK 4 stylesheet

- `xfwm4/` — window decorations, plus `-hdpi` (1.5x) and `-xhdpi` (2x) variants

- `assets/` — raster assets shared by both GTK stylesheets

- `rofi/` — `darkmatter.rasi`, a drop-in theme (`@theme "darkmatter"`) matching

  the palette above

- `dunst/` — `dunstrc`, the color and geometry sections themed to match;

  merge into your own config or run standalone with `dunst -config`

Both `gtk.css` and `gtk-dark.css` are built from dark sources. Darkmatter has

no light variant, so an app asking for the dark stylesheet by name gets the

same theme rather than falling through to something else.

Nordic's GTK 2, GNOME Shell, Cinnamon, KDE and Metacity trees are not carried

over, and neither is its Inkscape-based asset pipeline.

## Window buttons

Upstream draws the window controls as macOS-style traffic lights — a colored

disc per button, with the glyph appearing on hover. Darkmatter keeps that

geometry but drops the hues: the discs are grey at rest, dim to `#333333` when

the window loses focus, and brighten on hover. Close is the one button that

takes the accent.

This applies to both the xfwm4 decorations and the GTK client-side ones.

```

`sassc` specifically, not dart-sass. Nordic's stylesheets extend compound

selectors in 24 places (`@extend %selected_items:disabled` and friends), which

libsass accepts and modern dart-sass rejects outright. Building with dart-sass

would mean restructuring those extends and changing the generated CSS.

```sh

`src/install.sh` installs three themes — `Darkmatter`, `Darkmatter-hdpi` and

`Darkmatter-xhdpi` — which differ only in decoration scale. Select the GTK

theme and the window manager theme separately in *Settings → Appearance* and

*Settings → Window Manager*.

### Recoloring

The asset recolorers exist so the port can be re-derived rather than

hand-edited, and they read the palette from `src/lib/darkmatter.py`:

- `src/recolor-assets.py` — the GTK raster assets

- `src/recolor-svgs.py` — the SVG sources

- `src/recolor-xfwm4-png.py` — the nine frame pieces that have no SVG source

- `src/recolor-thumbnails.py` — the theme-picker thumbnails

They map Nordic's colors to Darkmatter's, so they run **once against pristine

Nordic assets**. Re-running them over already-converted files will drift.

`src/lib/darkmatter.py` and `gtk-3.0/_darkmatter.scss` hold the same palette

and are kept in sync by hand — the SCSS is the source of truth for the

stylesheets, the Python for the assets.