Appearance, region and location

These tables affect every glimpse surface: the panel, popovers, notifications, the lock screen and the wallpaper.

Appearance

The theme, light or dark, blur and animation speed.

[appearance]

animation-speednumber from 0 to 10 default 1

Set your animation speed from 0.1 to 10, or 0 to turn animations off. Use 2.0 for twice as fast or 0.5 for half as fast; your wallpaper uses transition-ms instead.

blurboolean default false

Blur what is behind the bar, popovers, notifications and dialogs. Your compositor must support blur.

color-schemeone of default "dark"

Choose desktop to follow your desktop mode, or light or dark to keep glimpse in one mode.

• "light"
• "dark"
• "desktop"

desktop-color-schemeone of default "sun"

Choose sun to turn your desktop dark at sunset and light at sunrise, light or dark to keep it in one mode, or external to let another tool decide. Without a known location, sun leaves your desktop mode alone.

• "sun"
• "light"
• "dark"
• "external"

themestring default "adwaita"

Choose a theme from ~/.config/glimpse/themes or the installed themes.

theme-variantstring default ""

Choose an alternate look provided by your theme.

animation-speed accepts 0, or a value from 0.1 to 10. 1.0 is the default pace, 0.5 is half as fast, 2.0 is twice as fast and 0 turns animations off.

Light and dark

desktop-color-scheme decides the desktop's mode, which your apps follow; color-scheme decides glimpse's own. You need glimpse-settings-daemon running for glimpse to set the desktop mode or respond to glimpsectl appearance commands.

For desktop-color-scheme, choose sun (the default) to turn your desktop dark at sunset and light at sunrise. Without a known location, it leaves your desktop mode unchanged. See Location. Choose light or dark to set the desktop preference at startup and restore it whenever another tool changes it. Choose external to leave the preference to you or another tool.

For color-scheme, choose dark (the default) or light to keep your bar, popovers, notifications, lock screen and wallpaper in one mode. Choose desktop to follow that preference.

You want	desktop-color-scheme	color-scheme
Follow the sun everywhere	"sun"	"desktop"
A dark bar with apps following the sun	"sun"	"dark"
Switch modes yourself in GNOME Settings	"external"	"desktop"
Always dark everywhere	"dark"	"desktop"

glimpsectl appearance set light or glimpsectl appearance set dark holds your desktop in one mode with any configured value. glimpsectl appearance resume clears the hold and returns to your configured policy. With external, it restores the preference from before the hold only if another tool hasn't changed it. With sun and no known location, resume reports no solar phase yet and leaves the desktop mode unchanged. A hold ends on a desktop policy change or a clean daemon shutdown. The desktop preference is org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme: prefer-light or prefer-dark.

Blur

With blur set, the bar, popovers, notifications and password dialogs blur the windows and wallpaper behind them:

[appearance]
blur = true

Your compositor draws the blur, so it needs to support it, and how strong it looks is set in the compositor's own configuration. glimpse asks for blur through the ext-background-effect protocol, which needs GTK 4.23.3 or newer. Where it isn't supported, glimpse stays solid and works the same.

With niri 26.04 or newer you don't enable anything on the compositor side: it blurs every surface that asks. Its blur {} section sets the strength for all of them.

By default niri blurs these surfaces against the wallpaper only, ignoring the windows behind them. To blur what is actually underneath the bar, popovers, notifications and dialogs, add this layer rule:

// ~/.config/niri/config.kdl
layer-rule {
    match namespace="^glimpse-(popover|notifications|panel|agents)$"
    background-effect {
        xray false
    }
}

Themes

A theme is a directory of stylesheets. glimpse ships one, adwaita, and looks for your own under ~/.config/glimpse/themes/<name>/ first. The shipped theme's only nonempty stylesheet is dark.css, which makes the bar black in dark mode. Your own theme does not inherit it.

Region

The language, how glimpse writes times and units. hour-format changes the world clock, next-event rows, power charge and empty estimates, idle times and weather times. It does not change the bar clock, the display applet's paused-until time, the night-light schedule, glimpsectl night-light status output or the lock clock. The bar clock has its own label-format; set it to %-I:%M %p for a 12-hour clock. The lock clock uses time-format under [lock].

hour-format = "locale" follows LC_TIME, and units = "locale" follows LC_MEASUREMENT. With en_US, those defaults produce 12-hour times and Fahrenheit.

An empty language uses your system language, and a new value applies the next time glimpse starts. If the LANGUAGE environment variable is set in your session, it wins and language has no effect. Date formatting, weekday names and month names follow your system settings, not language.

[regional]

What language this session reads, and how it writes a time of day and a measurement. Every setting here defaults to what the environment already says, so an empty table is the right answer on a machine whose locale is set up.

hour-formatone of default "locale"

How you display times throughout glimpse. Your bar and lock screen clocks use their own formats.

• "locale" Your system's time format.
• "12h" 3:30 PM.
• "24h" 15:30.

languagestring default ""

Your text language, such as ru for Russian; leave it empty to use your system language. Changes apply after you restart glimpse.

unitsone of default "locale"

Your weather units for temperature, wind speed and rainfall.

• "locale" Your system's measurement units.
• "metric" Read Celsius, kilometers per hour and millimeters.
• "imperial" Fahrenheit, miles per hour, inches.

Location

glimpse needs to know roughly where you are to switch to dark mode and warm the screen at sunset, and to show the local weather. Leave the [geolocation] table out to ask GeoClue, the system location service. If you write the table, provider is required. latitude and longitude are read only with manual.

To keep location services off, or if GeoClue can't place you, write your coordinates instead. Both are required with manual:

[geolocation]
provider = "manual"
latitude = 52.37
longitude = 4.90

latitude runs from -90 to 90, and longitude from -180 to 180. Config validation accepts values outside those ranges, but glimpse then has no location, shows no sunset times and leaves the desktop's light/dark mode unchanged when you choose sun. Run glimpsectl geolocation status to check the location and solar phase. Changes to [geolocation] apply without a restart.

glimpse saves GeoClue fixes in ~/.local/state/glimpse/location.json and uses the remembered fix when GeoClue is unavailable, so sunset times remain available offline. A manual location comes from the configuration and is never saved there.