Vogix

A NixOS UX subsystem for unified desktop appearance and behavior.

Vogix is a declarative UX layer for NixOS that unifies desktop configuration - define your appearance (colors, fonts, transparency, animations) and behavior (keybindings, window rules, gestures) once, and vogix generates configs for all your applications.

Currently implemented:

• Appearance - runtime color theme switching across 4 schemes, no system rebuilds.
• Behavior - an ontology-driven keyboard input engine: modal + chorded keybindings, optional dual-role CapsLock, and selectable interaction paradigms (vogix / i3 / cua / emacs / vim / windows / macos / linux).

Vision: Full desktop UX management - see roadmap.

[!WARNING]
right now this runs and working in a vm.

nix run .#vogix-vm

vogix is alpha, however it is "battlefield tested" as it is integrated to mynixos and my system.

Roadmap

Vogix is evolving from a color theming tool to a full NixOS UX subsystem. See #149 for the complete vision.

Appearance (how things look)

• Colors - runtime theme switching
• Typography - fonts, sizes, weights
• Transparency - opacity, blur
• Backgrounds - wallpapers
• Window chrome - borders, gaps, radius
• Animations - duration, easing
• Cursors - theme, size
• Icons - icon themes
• Notifications - mako, dunst styling
• GTK/Qt - toolkit theming
• HiDPI - scaling
• Shaders - future CRT / bloom post-processing effects (the monochromatic screen shader already ships — see Features)

Behavior (how things act)

• Keybindings - ontology-driven input engine: modes, optional dual-role CapsLock, interaction paradigms (vogix/i3/cua/emacs/vim/windows/macos/linux)
• Window rules - floating, positioning
• Focus - follow mouse, click-to-focus
• Gestures - touchpad, touchscreen

Philosophy

Declarative. Define your desktop experience once in a single config. Vogix generates the app-specific configs.

Reproducible. Built on Nix. Same inputs = same outputs. Templates are immutable in the Nix store, rendering is deterministic.

Compositor-agnostic. Works with Hyprland, Sway, i3, and others. Define your UX, vogix handles the translation.

Color Schemes

Vogix supports 4 color schemes, each with its own philosophy:

Features

• Multi-Scheme Support: 4 color schemes (vogix16, ansi16, base16, base24)
  • vogix16 (default) - Semantic design system focused on functional colors (19 native themes)
  • ansi16 - Terminal ANSI standard (~450 themes)
  • base16 - Minimal palette standard, widely used for UI and syntax highlighting (~300 themes)
  • base24 - Expanded base16 palette with extra accents (~180 themes)
• Runtime Theme Switching: Change themes without NixOS rebuilds
• Multi-Variant Themes: Themes can have multiple variants (e.g., catppuccin: latte, frappe, macchiato, mocha)
• Polarity Navigation: Switch between lighter/darker variants with vogix theme set -v lighter / vogix theme set -v darker
• Application-Specific Configs: Direct integration for supported applications
• Monochromatic Screen Shader: A palette-derived Hyprland screen shader ships today — it desaturates the screen to a light/dark blend of the active theme's ramp while preserving the functional colors, applied/cleared via hyprctl and driven by the full vogix shader CLI (on/off/toggle/status, with intensity/brightness params)
• Multiple Reload Methods: Unix signals, command, filesystem watching (touch), or none
• Nix-Based Theme Generation: All theme configurations pre-generated at build time
• NixOS Integration: Home Manager module with systemd service
• Shell Completions: Support for Bash, Zsh, Fish, and Elvish

Input Engine

A single ontology-driven input daemon (evdev grab → uinput re-emit + compositor IPC) that owns the keyboard — no kanata, no compositor submaps — so the same keybindings work even without a running compositor.

• Modes (optional): the engine can model a typed mode statechart (e.g. app / desktop / move / resize / console). Modes and their bindings are loaded as data, not hard-coded; "stuck in a mode" is unrepresentable (machine-checked against the praxis HMI ontology — Raskin/Norman/Harel). The shipped vogix default is a single flat app mode with no submodes; the named multi-mode statechart (desktop / move / console) currently appears only in test fixtures. Paradigms that need a submode add their own (e.g. i3 adds a resize submap, vim an insert submode).
• Dual-role CapsLock (optional): an engine capability — tap = sticky (locked) mode, hold = momentary (reverts on release); a forgotten sticky mode idle-reverts. Esc is an always-available safety-net exit; the active mode is shown by the window border. It is NOT enabled by the vogix default (CapsLock stays CapsLock); you opt in by authoring layers.
• Interaction paradigms: select a whole keymap flavour as data and layer your own bindings on top —
  • vogix (default) - the house WM-navigation layout (Super-chorded hjkl + arrows) in a single app mode
  • i3 / vim - modal flavours that add a submode (resize / insert)
  • cua - the IBM/Windows Ctrl-shortcut standard
  • windows / macos / linux - desktop chorded navigation (each cited to the platform's keyboard-shortcut docs)
  • emacs - Ctrl/Meta motion as a single passthrough app mode (multi-key C-x prefixes modelled as transient modes are future work — not yet in the preset)
• Context-aware macOS-Command remap: Super behaves like ⌘ (Super+C → Ctrl+C), retargeted to Ctrl+Shift in terminals so it can't SIGINT a running job.

Quick Start

Installation (NixOS with Flakes)

Add to your flake.nix:

{
  inputs.vogix.url = "github:i-am-logger/vogix";

  outputs = { nixpkgs, home-manager, vogix, ... }: {
    homeConfigurations.youruser = home-manager.lib.homeManagerConfiguration {
      modules = [
        vogix.homeManagerModules.default
        {
          # Enable applications you want to theme
          programs.alacritty.enable = true;
          programs.btop.enable = true;

          # Configure vogix
          programs.vogix = {
            enable = true;
            appearance = {
              scheme = "vogix16";
              theme = "yoga";
              variant = "dark";
            };
          };
        }
      ];
    };
  };
}

Usage

# Show current theme state
vogix theme status

# List all schemes with theme counts
vogix theme list

# List themes in a specific scheme
vogix theme list -s base16

# Set scheme, theme, and variant
vogix theme set -s base16 -t catppuccin -v mocha

# Navigate to a darker variant
vogix theme set -v darker

# Navigate to a lighter variant
vogix theme set -v lighter

# `dark`/`light` are aliases of `darker`/`lighter` — one step toward dark/light
vogix theme set -v dark
vogix theme set -v light

# Generate shell completions
vogix completions bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/vogix

Testing

Vogix includes automated integration tests:

# Run all tests
./test.sh

# Or use nix directly
nix flake check

See TESTING.md for detailed testing documentation.

Documentation

• Architecture - System architecture and integration
• CLI Reference - Command-line interface guide
• Theming Guide - Creating and customizing themes
• Reload Mechanisms - Application reload methods
• Vogix16 Design System - Default scheme philosophy and formats

Defaults

Vogix ships with the vogix16 scheme as the default, using the yoga theme in dark mode unless configured otherwise.

Example Themes

Vogix supports themes from multiple sources:

• vogix16: Native themes from vogix16-themes (yoga, forest, etc.)
• ansi16: Imported from iTerm2-Color-Schemes
• base16/base24: Imported from tinted-schemes (catppuccin, dracula, gruvbox, nord, etc.)

Create custom vogix16 themes by following the vogix16-themes contribution guide.

Requirements

• NixOS (for full integration) or any Linux distribution (for standalone binary)
• Rust Edition 2024
• Hyprland (for the screen shader, input engine, and session restore)
• App reloads use Unix signals, a command, or a touch of the theme file — no DBus/IPC dependency

License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) 4.0 International

See LICENSE for details.

Contributing

• Contributing Guide - How to contribute to Vogix
• Development Guide - Setting up development environment
• Testing Guide - Automated testing documentation

Acknowledgments

Vogix is inspired by projects in the theme ecosystem and incorporates scheme data from upstream sources:

• tinted-theming/schemes - Source for base16/base24 schemes (via fork)
• iTerm2-Color-Schemes - Source for ansi16 schemes (via fork)
• Base16 - Palette standard that informed scheme conventions
• Stylix - NixOS theming inspiration
• Omarchy - Runtime theme switching inspiration