AyuDark — a Kvantum theme + KDE colour scheme

A Qt/Kvantum widget theme matching the Ayu (Dark) colorscheme: near-black blue-grey surfaces, warm grey text, gold accent. Ships with a companion KDE colour scheme, since Kvantum styles Qt widgets but Plasma's own shell, KWin decorations and parts of KDE apps read KColorScheme instead.

Install

./install.sh              # copy both into place
./install.sh --activate   # ...and switch to them

Manually, if you prefer:

cp -r AyuDark ~/.config/Kvantum/
cp color-scheme/AyuDarkKvantum.colors ~/.local/share/color-schemes/
kvantummanager --set AyuDark
plasma-apply-colorscheme AyuDarkKvantum

Outside a KDE session you also need QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=kvantum in your environment for Qt apps to load the engine. Restart Qt apps to pick up changes.

What's here

path
AyuDark/AyuDark.kvconfig	theme config: palette, per-widget text colors, metrics
AyuDark/AyuDark.svg	the widget graphics
color-scheme/AyuDarkKvantum.colors	KDE colour scheme, listed as "Ayu Dark (Kvantum)"
generate.py	regenerates all three — edit this, not the output
install.sh	per-user installer
palette/dark.yaml	verbatim copy of ayu-colors themes/dark.yaml, the palette source
licenses/	upstream license texts (ayu-colors MIT, Kvantum GPL-3.0)

How it was built

Kvantum themes are SVG-driven, so the widget geometry (corner radii, frame insets, gradients, every arrow and grip) is drawing work, independent of color. Rather than redraw it, generate.py uses KvArcDark as a geometry donor and remaps its colors: it's a flat dark theme whose whole palette is one blue-grey lightness ramp plus a single accent hue, which makes a principled remap possible instead of a per-element guess.

Every color is classified into one of four families:

family	source	mapped to
A surfaces	blue-greys, S < 20%, H 195–265°	Ayu's surface ramp, hue 220°
B accent	S ≥ 40%, H 190–265°	Ayu's gold, hue 40° — lightness preserved
C specials	other saturated hues	the matching Ayu color (red, purple)
D glyphs	achromatic greys	warm neutrals in the Ayu foreground family

Family A is the interesting one. Its lightness curve is anchored so that six of the donor's structural colors land exactly on real Ayu palette values:

KvArcDark	role	AyuDark	Ayu name
#22252e	frames, borders	#080b0f	surface.base -L0.1
#383c4a	window background	#0d1017	surface.base
#404552	base / list background	#10141c	surface.lift
#474d5d	hover	#161b24	editor.line
#505666	pressed, grooves	#1b2029	ui.line
#92959d	window-decoration glyphs	#5a6477	ui.fg
#5294e2	accent	#e6b34e	common.accent.tint

Everything else interpolates between those anchors, so the donor's state relationships (normal → hover → pressed always gets lighter) survive intact while the absolute values become Ayu's.

Text on the accent

The one place a mechanical remap isn't enough. KvArcDark's accent is a mid blue carrying near-white text; Ayu's is a light gold, so that text has to flip dark. The catch is Kvantum's inherits= chain: PanelButtonCommand is both the pushbutton section and the base of a dozen others whose background never becomes the accent, so a blanket change would put dark text on checkbox and tab labels sitting on the window background.

generate.py therefore flips text per section, based on which interiors the SVG actually paints with the accent:

• dark text — PanelButtonCommand (pressed/toggled), MenuItem, MenuBarItem, ItemView, ToolboxTab, HeaderSection (pressed)
• light text, explicitly restored — CheckBox, RadioButton, IndicatorSpinBox, Toolbar, Dock, DockTitle, GroupBox, TitleBar, Menu, Tab

The SVG also gains menuitem-focused* / menubaritem-focused* aliases onto the existing -toggled* elements. No shipped Kvantum theme defines those, so the engine resolves menu hover through -toggled/-pressed; the aliases guarantee the gold background is drawn whichever status the engine picks — which matters precisely because those sections' focus text is now dark.

The KDE colour scheme

Generated from the same palette constants, so the two agree where they overlap: Colors:Window / Colors:View / Colors:Button backgrounds are byte-identical to window.color / base.color / button.color in the kvconfig. Structure matches BreezeDark.colors exactly — all twelve sections including Plasma 6's Colors:Header, Colors:Header][Inactive] and Colors:Complementary.

group	background	from
Window	#0d1017	surface.base
View	#10141c	surface.lift
Button	#12171f	matches the SVG's button interior
Tooltip	#0f131a	ui.popup.bg
Header	#141821	ui.panel.bg
Complementary	#080a0f	surface.sunk
Selection	#e6b450	common.accent.tint

Foregrounds come straight from the Ayu syntax colors — link #59c2ff, visited #d2a6ff, negative #f07178, neutral #ffb454, positive #aad94c.

The Selection group needed real work rather than a copy. Its background is the light gold accent, so foregrounds tuned for a dark surface would be unreadable on it. darken_onto() walks each hue's lightness down only as far as 4.5:1 against the gold requires, keeping it as recognisably itself as possible, and emit_color_scheme() asserts the result — so the build fails rather than silently shipping unreadable selected text. (It caught one on the first run.)

generate.py prints a contrast audit for every group. Everything clears 4.5:1 except ForegroundInactive, which sits at ~3:1 because it is Ayu's ui.fg (#5a6378) — the palette's own dim inactive-UI color. Kept for fidelity; raise its lightness in DARK_GROUP_FG if you'd rather have the contrast.

Regenerating

python3 generate.py

Requires /usr/share/Kvantum/KvArcDark (Fedora: bundled with kvantum). Prints the contrast audit and the full source → target color table.

To retune, edit SURFACE_ANCHORS (the lightness/saturation curve), TEXT_OVERRIDES (per-section text colors) or AYU / DARK_GROUP_FG (the palette) — not the generated files.

Verification

The Kvantum theme was rendered with kvantumpreview against a sandboxed XDG_CONFIG_HOME, across all six widget pages plus an open menu, confirming: gold accent with readable dark text on buttons, toggled tool buttons, checkboxes, radios, sliders, progress bars, table selections, menu bar items and menu items; light text preserved on checkbox/radio/tab labels; disabled states legible.

The colour scheme is checked structurally against BreezeDark.colors (no missing sections or keys, all values valid RGB triplets) and by the contrast audit above.

Note on the existing AyuDark.colors

~/.local/share/color-schemes/AyuDark.colors already contained an unrelated Ayu scheme. This one is deliberately named AyuDarkKvantum so it installs alongside rather than over it. The two differ: the pre-existing file uses Ayu's teal (#94e6ca) as its selection/decoration color, which clashes with this Kvantum theme's gold, and its BackgroundAlternate values for Window, Button and Tooltip are light-theme leftovers (248,248,248, 252,252,252, 230,230,230). Delete it if you don't want the duplicate entry.

Credits & license

Palette — ayu-colors by Konstantin Pschera, MIT. palette/dark.yaml is a verbatim copy of that project's themes/dark.yaml; every color here derives from it. The MIT notice is retained at licenses/ayu-colors.MIT.txt and must stay with any redistribution, since the palette values are substantially reproduced in the generated files.

Widget geometry — KvArcDark by Tsu Jan, GPL-3.0-or-later. Only colors were changed, so AyuDark/AyuDark.svg and AyuDark/AyuDark.kvconfig are derivative works and stay GPL-3.0-or-later.

color-scheme/AyuDarkKvantum.colors contains no KvArcDark-derived content and is MIT; its [ColorEffects:*] tuning follows BreezeDark.colors (KDE, LGPL-2.0-or-later). generate.py / install.sh are MIT.

MIT is GPL-compatible, so the repository as a whole is redistributable under GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE for the full breakdown.