External style configuration file

[AlecsFerra]

It would be cool to have an option to load an external file for configuring the colors so the application can be themed automatically by software like pywal.

[Mesabloo]

After taking a look into the library I think is used⁽¹⁾, there doesn't seem to be a way of handling file inclusions in configuration files using the library.
We could instead have a key "include" or "import" in the configuration, and handle all the inclusion logic directly in this program⁽²⁾, but this is a little bit more work. (especially considering all the difficulties that could arise)

I unfortunately cannot work on this because I'm on NixOS and there is a known bug I ran into that prevents me from compiling the haskell-gi package, which is needed by this program.

---

⁽¹⁾:

linux_notification_center/linux-notification-center.cabal

Line 55 in a155a6b

, ConfigFile

⁽²⁾: so for example, we could have a configuration file deadd.conf containing

[colors]
include = "~/.config/deadd/colors.conf"
# other configuration options

and the file colors.conf with all your colors.
The only problem that seems to arise (as little as I thought about it) is that the include key should be somehow replaced in-place (so the included file should take take the place of the include option to preserve option ordering, which is vital in an INI-style configuration style with sections). I believe this could mess with a little bit of the current code, unless we provide a way to concatenate two configurations in Config.hs, but then we would not preserve key ordering, unless we only allow includeing in the DEFAULT section (which restricts greatly its use with pieces of software like pywal because it doesn't insert a [colors] section header at the top of the file).

[phuhl]

This could be a part of a potential restructuring of the config as tracked by #80

[phuhl]

I currently don't think, there will be a way to import colors or anything, but you could easily write a script, that patches the new deadd.css file (more infos on that here: https://github.com/phuhl/linux_notification_center#css-styling) and than reload the styling information on the fly (more infos on that here: https://github.com/phuhl/linux_notification_center#usage). I guess, that would allow for styling with pywal.

I will close this for now, if I am wrong, and there are further changes needed, feel free to reopen