Quick start

Get started with tinct in minutes. This section covers the basics of generating themes and common workflows.

Prerequisites

• Tinct installed
• An image to extract colours from (wallpaper recommended)

Your first theme

Generate a theme from your wallpaper:

tinct generate -i image -p ~/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg -o all

This extracts colours from the image and applies them to all enabled output plugins.

Preview before applying

Use --preview to see the extracted palette without writing files:

tinct generate -i image -p ~/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg -o all --preview

Dry run mode

Use --dry-run to see what files would be written:

tinct generate -i image -p ~/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg -o all --dry-run

Target specific applications

Instead of all, specify the plugins you want:

# Just terminal and window manager
tinct generate -i image -p ~/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg -o kitty,hyprland,waybar

# Just desktop environment
tinct generate -i image -p ~/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg -o gnome-shell,libadwaita,gtk4

What happens next

After generation, tinct:

1. Writes configuration files to application-specific locations
2. Tracks all generated files in .tinct-manifest.json
3. Optionally triggers reload hooks (e.g., reloading Kitty, applying Hyprpaper)

See the individual plugin documentation for reload behaviour and output paths.

Quick start guides

• Create your first theme - Step-by-step walkthrough
• Common workflows - Popular theme recipes