Apple Glass Light

A macOS-inspired light theme for Omarchy. Bright translucent glass, squircle corners, and a palette that started from Apple's light-mode system colors and was then darkened until it actually passed contrast on the translucent ground it really sits on.

The part a screenshot cannot show: this theme was tuned against moving water. The blur and the palette were both set with the omarchy-aquarium animated background running underneath: a live GLSL underwater scene, not a still wallpaper. Light glass is the harder half of the pair: a bright pane over dark water goes grey fast, so brightness has to lift the backdrop toward white (1.16), vibrancy has to drop further than in the dark theme (0.14, because a light pane that picks up the water's color reads as tinted plastic), and the window alpha is higher throughout. The theme still works over a static wallpaper; it was simply not tuned there.

Pairs with apple-glass. The two switch automatically on the sun (sunrise and sunset for your location, or a fixed window) via macarchy-auto-appearance from macarchy-core, the same way macOS's "Auto" appearance setting works. Choosing any other theme is treated as an override, so the timer never yanks a deliberate choice out from under you.

Install

omarchy-theme-install https://github.com/macarchy/apple-glass-light

Palette

These are not Apple's stock light-mode colors, and that is the point. They began as Apple's accessible variants (systemRed #d70015 rather than #ff3b30, and so on). But on this theme text sits on a 0.70-alpha pane over the aquarium, whose water pulls the effective terminal ground down to roughly #95afcf at its darkest daytime — measured, not guessed — and at that ground even the accessible set fell below 3:1. Every ANSI color below is the minimal darkening (hue and saturation kept) that reaches WCAG 3:1 on that measured ground. muted reaches 4.5:1, because it carries body text: dim lines and comments.

Role	Hex		Role	Hex
accent	#007aff		red	#b80012
selection	#d1d1d6		orange	#aa2c00
muted	#414144		yellow	#864c00
background	#f5f5f7		green	#1b682e
dark_background	#e8e8ed		cyan	#00618d
darker_background	#d8d8de		blue	#0040dd
lighter_background	#ffffff		magenta	#7f3f9e
foreground	#1d1d1f		brown	#6d573b
dark_foreground	#414144		bright_red	#b70a00
light_foreground	#3a3a3c		bright_yellow	#755507
bright_foreground	#000000		bright_green	#1b682f
			bright_cyan	#106086
			bright_blue	#0058b8
			bright_magenta	#8a24bd

Note that the bright_* slots are no longer vivid. On light glass, vivid is unreadable.

On light glass the window rim is a dark hairline rather than a highlight: the pane is brighter than what surrounds it, so its edge reads as a shadow.

active   rgba(00000059) → rgba(00000018) at 135°
inactive rgba(00000014)

The material

From hyprland.lua, applied after Omarchy's own look-and-feel so it wins while this theme is current and is gone the moment you set another one. Nothing outside the theme directory is touched.

Setting	Value	Why
blur.size / blur.passes	20 / 4	Matches the dark theme: the deep macOS-style frost. The 4th pass is the only real cost; size alone is free in dual-kawase.
blur.brightness	1.16	What makes this read as light glass — Apple's light material lifts the backdrop toward white before tinting it. Over deep-blue water the lift has to be stronger than it would over a bright wallpaper, or the panes turn murky.
blur.contrast	0.95
blur.vibrancy	0.14	Lower than the dark theme. The water is already saturated; a light pane that picks up its color looks like tinted plastic.
blur.vibrancy_darkness	0.0	Deepening shadows here would only make the pane look dirty.
blur.noise	0.02	A trace of grain, also hiding banding.
blur.xray	true	Every pane blurs straight through to the background layer, not to the windows behind it, so stacked translucency stops compounding.
blur.ignore_opacity	true	Apps that paint their own translucency get the material too.
rounding / rounding_power	14 / 2.6	rounding_power > 2 bends the corner into a squircle, the continuous curve macOS uses, instead of a circular quarter-arc.
border_size	1	A hairline.
gaps_in / gaps_out	6 / 12
shadow	range 26, power 3, offset 0 6, rgba(00000026)	Shorter and much fainter than the dark theme's — a dark-mode-strength shadow reads as grime against a bright wallpaper.
misc.session_lock_blur	true	Glass over the desktop while locked.

Window opacity. Regular windows run 0.93 focused / 0.87 unfocused — higher than the dark theme, because dark text on a translucent light pane loses contrast faster than light text on a dark one: what shows through raises the floor instead of lowering the ceiling. Terminals are the exception, carrying their own glass (0.70 background alpha in alacritty.toml, kitty.conf and foot.ini) so glyphs stay fully opaque while the background lets light through. The compositor leaves them at 1.0 / 0.95 and skips blurring them, which keeps the scene behind crisp instead of frosting it into a featureless slab.

Those terminals are matched by Omarchy's own terminal tag (default/hypr/apps/terminals.lua) rather than a hand-written class list. Omarchy launches TUIs and its own terminal windows under dedicated app-ids, so the tag's pattern ends in org\.omarchy\..*|TUI\..*, so every one of those is covered the day it appears. A spelled-out regex is not: it misses each new TUI, and it missed ghostty, wezterm and foot's org.codeberg.dnkl.foot app-id outright. The miss shows up as one terminal rendering as an opaque slab beside its glassy neighbours.

Which surfaces are glass

Shell surfaces are layer-shell, not windows, so each namespace opts in explicitly. Blurred: the bar, menu, notifications, OSD, polkit prompt, reminders, clipboard, emoji picker, image selector, keyboard panel, network QR, the network / disk / speed tests, the macarchy.switcher Cmd+Tab switcher, the phmatray.notification-center and macarchy.control-center sidebars, and nwg-dock when one is running. The background layer is deliberately not blurred: it is the thing everything else blurs.

Every surface runs a higher alpha than its dark counterpart, for the same contrast reason:

Surface	Background alpha	(dark theme)
Lock screen	0.60	0.45
Bar	0.68	0.55
App launcher	0.74	0.62
Menu	0.76	0.66
Notifications / popups	0.78	0.68 / 0.70
Tooltip / polkit	0.82	0.72

Controls are inverted from the dark theme: fills are black at low alpha (0.06 normal, 0.10 hover), so a control reads as recessed into the light pane rather than glowing on top of it. Keyboard focus stays loud — a #007aff ring at 0.9 alpha, deliberately distinct from hover, because it is the only cue for where the keyboard is pointing. The menu scrim dims toward grey (#3a3a3c), not toward black, the way macOS does.

What ships

• colors.toml — the contrast-corrected palette above, plus the Hyprland border gradients.
• hyprland.lua — blur, rounding, shadows, opacity rules, layer rules.
• alacritty.toml, kitty.conf, foot.ini — full 16-color ANSI sets and the matching 0.70 background alpha.
• shell.bar.toml, shell.controls.toml, shell.launcher.toml, shell.lock.toml, shell.menu.toml, shell.notifications.toml, shell.polkit.toml, shell.popups.toml, shell.tooltip.toml, shell.image-picker.toml — the Omarchy shell surfaces.
• claude.json — a matching Claude Code theme, carrying the same corrected colors into the terminal UI (diffs, prompt border, plan/accept modes).
• icons.theme — Yaru-blue.
• backgrounds/ — three original generated gradients at 2560×1600: Daybreak, Sandstone, Seaglass. Use them, or run the aquarium instead.

Gallery

The dark twin, same windows, same moment. macarchy-auto-appearance swaps the two at sunrise and sunset:

docs/SHOTS.md lists what is still missing, including the one thing no still frame can carry: the water moving behind the panes.

License

MIT. Wallpapers are original generated gradients.