Castle on a Lake

A warm, earthy dark theme for Omarchy 4 (Quattro)

#dark · #art-theme · #landscapes · #day-night

Warm stone, firelight, sage, lake reflections, and twilight violet on a near-black canvas — a quiet, old-stone calm.

Named after the four castle images it ships with (two paintings, each in day and night versions), the theme's palette is drawn directly from colors in the paintings — sandstone, firelight, sage, lake reflections, storm sky, and twilight violet — so every hue has a natural anchor in the artwork. And the background follows the sun: it switches itself to the -night variant at sunset and back at sunrise.

Highlights

• Day / night auto-switching backgrounds — the wallpaper follows the sun (see below)
• Two castle paintings by Raphael Lacoste — daytime and nighttime versions of two scenes
• Wallpaper-derived palette — every color drawn from the castle paintings: sandstone, firelight, sage, lake reflections, storm sky, twilight violet
• Custom Neovim theme — full highlight groups (editor, syntax, Treesitter, LSP, and popular plugins) built directly from the palette
• Theme-guarded helper — only acts while this theme is active
• Whole-desktop coverage — colors.toml themes the desktop, shell, and terminals; a bundled neovim.lua covers the editor with full highlight groups for syntax, Treesitter, LSP, and popular plugins

Day / Night Background Switching

At sunset the background becomes the -night variant, and at sunrise it switches back. The helper looks up real sunrise/sunset times for your location every day — the location configured for the Omarchy weather panel, or detected from your IP when none is set.

Install it (safe to re-run, nothing to configure):

bash ~/.config/omarchy/themes/castle-on-a-lake/daynight/install.sh

Remove it:

bash ~/.config/omarchy/themes/castle-on-a-lake/daynight/uninstall.sh

Notes:

• The helper is theme-guarded, so it only changes the background while the Castle On A Lake theme is active. A background picked manually via the switcher is left untouched.
• Requires network access for the daily sunrise/sunset lookup.
• A post-boot hook starts the daemon at login; its log lives at ~/.local/state/omarchy/bg-daynight-daemon.log. Check it's running with pgrep -f bg-daynight-daemon.

Installation

omarchy theme install https://github.com/shmall03/omarchy-castle-on-a-lake-theme.git

Or via the menu (Super + Alt + Space → Install > Style > Theme) — paste the repo URL and press Enter.

Then apply it:

omarchy theme set castle-on-a-lake

Or pick it under Style > Theme in the menu.

Wallpapers

Artwork	Daytime	Nighttime
Castle on a Lake Raphael Lacoste, via wallhaven.cc/w/ogj6kp
Castle in Front of a Mountain Raphael Lacoste, via wallhaven.cc/w/jedy6p

Night versions derived from the originals with ImageMagick and GIMP — dimmer, cooler, moonlit contrast.

Color Palette

Theme Files

colors.toml       Color palette (wallpaper-derived)
neovim.lua        Custom Neovim colorscheme
backgrounds/      Wallpapers (day and night versions)
icons.theme       Yaru-wartybrown icons
daynight/         Day/night background switcher (see above)
unlock.png        Lock screen background
preview.png       Desktop preview
preview-unlock.png Lock screen preview
CHANGELOG.md      Version history
LICENSE           MIT license

More from shmall03

Media Lock Screen — a companion Omarchy Quattro project that replaces the built-in lock screen with one showing the currently playing track (MPRIS), a large clock, and your user name, with separate password and fingerprint PAM flows.

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/shmall03/omarchy-shmall.lock-plugin.git --enable

• GitHub repo
• omarchyplugins.com listing

Contributing

Bugs, ideas, and tweaks are welcome — open an issue or pull request.

License

The theme code — the color palette, Neovim theme, icon config, day/night switcher scripts, and all other files except the artwork — is released under the MIT License, Copyright (c) 2026 Ben Smith.

The bundled wallpapers are digital paintings by Raphael Lacoste, as tagged and source-linked on Wallhaven. Per Wallhaven, "all images remain property of their original owners" — they are not covered by the MIT license and are included only for use with this theme. The night versions are derivative edits made with ImageMagick and GIMP and carry no separate license.

Redistributing the artwork, including the night versions, or creating further derivatives requires the artist's permission. If you are the rights holder and would like these images removed, open an issue and they will be taken down.

Acknowledgments

• Raphael Lacoste — artist of the bundled wallpapers, as tagged and source-linked on Wallhaven (ogj6kp, jedy6p)
• Omarchy — the desktop this theme was made for