History

2016: A simple GUI contribution

Polychromatic started off as a GUI contribution to the razer_chroma_drivers repository, the predecessor to OpenRazer before it was forked, overhauled and rebranded to support over 100 devices as we know today.

This interface was like a prototype that used PolicyKit to elevate permissions and echo data to the sysfs driver.

Let’s refer to this one as v0.1.0.

v0.2.x: New repository, new name

4 months later, the application was decoupled into its own repository as it was unfeasible to maintain long-term mixed with a driver. It also got the name Polychromatic, hinting at its many colours functions.

The project also took over development of @terrycain’s tray applet as another GUI to interact with the driver.

The software has had small, incremental improvements over the years, but still drags the legacy of being built around the BlackWidow Chroma keyboard.

v0.3.x: Multiple devices

Now that OpenRazer went on to support more then just keyboards - the project now works with mice, mouse mats, keypads, laptops, the GPU enclosure, the mug, and many more.

The software added support for more then one device and has been packaged to run on many Linux distributions (thanks @z3ntu!)

v0.4.0 - v0.6.0: New design

To accommodate the growth of new devices and features, the project underwent a UI redesign drawn on sheets of e-paper.

It turns out, however, building a “hybrid desktop web app” was holding up progress. Simple things took ages to design and look good. After a couple of rewrites, it still didn’t feel like it could be a scalable application with clean code. It was still a weird hybrid of web technologies mixed with Python after all!

The third rewrite ported to PyQt5, a well documented cross-platform UI framework that lets us focus on the logic and new features.

The Future

Up to now, the project continues to have close ties with OpenRazer. We’d like to support other vendors some day, just in case your next RGB device isn’t a Razer one.

Taking inspiration from the Unix philosophy: “do one thing and one thing well” - one frontend to manage all your RGB.