Wallpapers and colours

Every colour in vela comes from the wallpaper. Pick one, and matugen turns it into a Material 3 palette that the shell and your apps all take.

Choosing a wallpaper

super + W opens the switcher: a strip of the images in ~/Pictures/Wallpapers, with the palette each would give on the left and a small bar wearing it on the right.

• Arrows move, Enter applies.
• Tab chooses light, dark or auto; Enter applies it with the wallpaper. Auto goes dark at sunset.
• super + shift + W goes back to the previous wallpaper.

From a terminal:

vela wallpaper ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/lake.jpg   # set it, and retheme
vela theme dark                                  # light, dark or toggle

What follows the palette

App	When
the shell	at once – every colour eases across
Hyprland (borders)	at once
kitty	at once, in every open window
cava	at once
GTK and libadwaita apps	light or dark at once; their colours on next start
fuzzel, hyprlock	next time they open

Just before the colours change, the shell holds a still frame over every open window and fades it away once the apps have repainted underneath, so every window crosses over to the new colours together.

Look and feel

Settings → Appearance sets the palette’s variant (how colourful it is), light / dark / auto, how round the corners are, how see-through the panels are, and motion: full, reduced or off, and how fast – Hyprland’s own window animations follow the same setting.

Evening warmth

After sunset the palette warms gradually, over an hour and a half. With hyprsunset installed it can warm the screen itself as well, on the same curve (Settings → General). The location for sunset is found from your connection, or you can name a city.

The terminal greeting

A new terminal opens with a short summary of the system in the palette’s colours. Turn it off with VELA_GREETING=off in your environment – in fish, set -Ux VELA_GREETING off.