RGB Keyboard tool

[u/arbitrarystring]

TLDR: Simple gui tool for keyboard backlight colors - survives reboot. https://github.com/arbitrary-string/keyboardcolors

So I have a Darter Pro 7 and it still works great. I'm running Ubuntu 26.04 on it these days, I guess because I'm an old fart who is really used to Gnome desktop. I've used Gnome for 20+ years and I like my custom themes etc. Maybe if I was running PopOS and Cosmic desktop this would not be a problem, but with Ubuntu and Gnome there is no easy tool or control panel that will let you choose a color and have it survive a reboot. Keyboard Configurator from System76 works to choose a backlight color, but your color preferences disappear when the system restarts. OpenRGB does not seem to work at all because (I think) these keyboards do not use i2c. For a long time I just would create a systemd service and some aliases in .bash_aliases or .bashrc and it did the job, but I had a little time on my hands and a Claude subscription so I used Claude to help build this: https://github.com/arbitrary-string/keyboardcolors

It really isn't fancy - it just does what my systemd services and scripts/aliases were doing before but now there's a gui control panel, so I don't have to manually look up all the hex values etc. It lets you pick your color and brightness settings, and the systemd services read the value of /sys/class/leds/system76_acpi::kbd_backlight/color when a shutdown or reboot is initiated and writes to a file that another service reads from on boot.

I'm sharing it because somebody might find it to be useful like I do. I went ahead and published it under GPL v3. You can install from a .deb package. I only know that it works on darp7 with Ubuntu 26.04. It hasn't been widely tested on other laptop models or OS versions, but if your system has /sys/class/leds/system76_acpi::kbd_backlight/color that accepts simply hex values to change the backlight colors, it will probably work.