script-wizards/athanor

Athanor is an alchemical layer for Arch and Hyprland, inspired by Western esotericism and dungeon crawling.

The bar shows the planetary hour. Athanor calculates it from your own sunrise and sunset and pairs each hour with a tarot trump from the Golden Dawn. Each machine draws its own card of the day and gets a lockscreen sigil made from its SSH host key. athanor draw 3 lays a three-card spread. When a program crashes you get a notification and athanor tomb draws its tombstone.

There are four color schemes. Each one is a stage of the alchemical Magnum Opus: Umber is nigredo, Vellum is albedo, Orpiment is citrinitas and Cinnabar is rubedo. Switch between them with athanor transmute. If you set stages = true they change on their own as the sun moves through the day.

The colors are named after old pigments. Orpiment is a yellow arsenic ore whose name means gold paint. Cinnabar is the mercury ore that vermilion was ground from. Body text has at least 7:1 contrast against the background and every accent has 4.5:1.

Helix, micro and nvim get themes built from the terminal's 16 colors. They change with the scheme. The installer puts them in place and tells you the line to add to each editor's config. Lualine has an athanor theme too. Its bar has no background of its own. Set lualine's section_separators and component_separators to '' to keep the arrows from drawing as loose triangles.

The seven workspaces are dungeon levels. There's one for each classical planet and each has its own Doré engraving dithered down to two tones. Set levels = false under [display] in athanor.toml to keep one plate on all of them.

The wallpapers are Gustave Doré's wood engravings, dithered to two colors with Floyd-Steinberg. To make your own from any image you only need ImageMagick:

magick in.jpg -colorspace gray -resize 960x540^ -gravity center -extent 960x540 \
  -sigmoidal-contrast 4x50% -dither FloydSteinberg -monochrome \
  +level-colors '#16120e,#5c4c39' -filter point -resize 200% out.png

That draws the image at half of 1920x1080 and doubles every pixel. Doubling keeps the dither crisp. The two colors are the ground and the ink. Doré's engravings are all public domain on Wikimedia Commons.

The bar at the bottom is a roguelike status line. Dlvl stands for dungeon level and shows the workspace you're on. $ is free disk space. Hp is the battery and T counts minutes since boot. Notifications show up one at a time on the top line. --More-- means more are waiting.

The window titles set into the frames come from the notch, an optional plugin (see Install).

Super+Shift+E asks before quitting Hyprland. Run athanor guide for the rest.

git clone https://github.com/script-wizards/athanor
cd athanor
./install.sh --dry-run
./install.sh

Athanor keeps its files in ~/.config/athanor. Outside that folder it only adds a marked block to the top of your .zshrc and your hyprland.lua. Your own settings load after the block and override it.

The prompt names each terminal window after its folder, or after the command running in it. Set ATHANOR_TITLE=0 in your .zshrc to keep your own titles.

Without Hyprland, ./install.sh shell installs just the command, the prompt and the fonts. ./install.sh --uninstall removes everything.

./install.sh notch also builds a small Hyprland plugin. It sets each window's title into the top of its border and draws a double rule round the focused window. A plugin only runs on the Hyprland it was built for, so run it again after every upgrade. athanor doctor tells you when.

An athanor was an alchemist's furnace. The word comes from the Arabic al-tannūr (the oven). Tandoor comes from the same root. The furnace was built as a tower filled with charcoal that slid down into the fire as it burned. That let it hold a low steady heat for weeks without anyone tending it. When did you last turn off your laptop?

Athanor borrows from Doré, the Golden Dawn, NetHack and a lot more. The full list is in INSPIRATIONS.md.

MIT. The plates, cards and fonts have their own terms, listed in NOTICE.md.