An open source RGB lighting management front-end application to customise OpenRazer peripherals on GNU/Linux. Soon to be vendor agnostic!

https://polychromatic.app

About

Polychromatic is a vendor agnostic front-end for managing lighting, RGB effects and some special functionality for keyboards, mice, keypads and just about any other gaming peripheral on your GNU/Linux system.

The software aims to make it easy to create and co-ordinate lighting effects that work across all compatible hardware, even if you switch to another brand also supported by Polychromatic.

View Features | View Screenshots | View FAQs and Documentation

Device Support

Polychromatic on its own is just a frontend, it needs at least one backend installed to provide the actual communication with the hardware.

Currently, OpenRazer is the only supported backend at the moment. (Being vendor agnostic is a fairly new objective!)

In future, this project would like to add support for:

• OpenRGB - supports many brands, including GPU, MB and RAM modules.
• phue - for Philips Hue support

Note: Between v0.7.0 and the next version, there will be some major refactoring in the backend classes.

View Device List

Download

Instructions for each supported distro are provided on the website:

• https://polychromatic.app/download/

Installing packages from a software repository is recommended as this will keep the software up-to-date, and your package system will keep track of dependencies.

If you need to test a specific change, grab an artifact from the Actions tab and extract to a folder (GitHub requires you to be signed in to download these). Make sure you have installed the dependencies.

Hacking / Contributing

Providing all the dependencies (including build ones) are installed, you can run the application directly from the Git repository folder without installing. Obtained the source code by either running git clone or downloading a copy as a zip folder.

Your configuration and cache is isolated into a savedatadev directory when running via polychromatic-controller-dev. To isolate the tray applet and command line interfaces, set this environment variable:

export POLYCHROMATIC_DEV_CFG=true

Then run the desired application:

./polychromatic-controller-dev
./polychromatic-tray-applet
./polychromatic-cli

While most of the project isn't compiled like conventional software, there are a couple of pieces that do:

./scripts/build-styles.sh
./scripts/build-locales.sh

These are performed by polychromatic-controller-dev and only need to be performed once, unless there's been code changes.

Building

If you have custom installation requirements, Polychromatic can be put together using Meson and Ninja.

• You’ll need an implementation of SASS to compile Polychromatic’s Controller Qt styling. sassc is widely available, but there’s other implementations that could be used.

• intltool is required for compiling translations.

• git is needed for retrieving the source code.

To build:

git clone https://github.com/polychromatic/polychromatic.git
cd polychromatic
meson build
ninja -C build install

View Dependencies

Something not working?

For OpenRazer users, occasionally, issues are caused by an improper driver installation. Polychromatic includes a troubleshooter to identify common problems. See our FAQs on OpenRazer if your device is not showing up or shows an error when changing settings.

For bugs specific to Polychromatic, please raise an issue here.

Translations

The software can speak multiple languages! Here's a guide if you'd like to contribute.

Donations

If you love this software and wish to leave a little something to excite the developer, you're welcome to do so via paypal.me. Thank you for your generosity!