This release focuses on fixing bugs, correcting inconsistencies and improving device compatibility with OpenRazer.

Changes

• The keyboard shortcuts in the editor for changing the brush's hue, saturation or lightness (HSL) has changed.

  Before	After
  Changing them without the mouse was painful for fingers - your hand was thrown all over the place!	Now that's a shortcut - they're physically grouped together for quick presses.

• For mice, the scroll wheel settings are now shown first, and then the logo, so it's logically the correct way round (#363)

Fixes

Controller

• Fix crash on Python 3.10 (#361)
• Fix crash when styles were missing (#341)
• Fix controls that were supposed to be in a disabled state.
• Fix retrieval of versions in About dialogs.
• Add support for future setting changes in OpenRazer Preferences (https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer/commit/6900641232c13440d3ef4766dc017133bb37aad3)
• Improvements to OpenRazer troubleshooter.

General

• Fix crash if there was a "data" Python module (#341)
• Fix error setting sleep time and low power mode.
• Fix error setting Pulsate/Static for BlackWidow 2013-era keyboards (#345)
• Fix graphics for charging zones.
• Add StartupWMClass to launcher (#359)

Tray Applet

• Add support for Ayatana Indicators.
  • Improves compatibility with Debian 11.
  • Ubuntu & Debian packages now depend on this package.

CLI

• Fix error setting DPI for DeathAdder 3.5G and similar mice (#354)
  • This is fixed in the next release of OpenRazer 3.2.0 (https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer/commit/36812033cd1ecdd1b3de5aa275b89dccefab6686)

It's here! 🎉 A new stable release after 3 years! 🥳 Just about everything has changed, overhauling the UI experience from v0.3.12 and vastly improving support for newer OpenRazer hardware.

What's New?

Controller

The main application is now based on PyQt5, dropping WebKitGTK. Essentially, this means it's no longer a hybrid web app and now functions as a traditional desktop application. Still featuring the familiar look & feel, but redesigned to be neat and tidy.

• New tab & sidebar interface.
• New preferences dialog.
• New colour picker dialog and saved colour management.
• New "Apply to All" section to quickly set an effect, brightness or colour to all capable devices.
• New "Device Info" dialog.
  • New "Inspect Matrix" for testing LEDs and co-ordinates (for compatible hardware)
• 🖱️ New DPI controls, allowing independent X/Y axis.
• 🖱️ Add ability to set custom DPI stages.
• Ability to use "native" system theme (distro-dependent)

Some slightly more trivial things:

• Ability to hide the new menu bar, pressing Alt to reveal.
• Add links to Help menu, and show dependency versions in About dialog.
• Warn when configuration was saved in a newer version of the program.
• Configure the window placement behaviour and toolbar preferences.
• Press F5 to refresh the tab list (or CTRL+F5 to fully reload)
• Drop --print-device-info parameter (this is replaced by "Device Info" and "Inspect Matrix")

Effect Editor

Create your own static and animated effects! This is available for any device capable of individually addressable LEDs (also known as a matrix). Click & drag with your pointer to draw on a graphic representing your devices, or use a grid.

• Effects will replay at login if they were playing previously.
• Key labels can be hidden for keyboards for a minimalist look.
• Added keyboard shortcuts.
• Add options to change the brush's hue, saturation and lightness, as well as shifting all LEDs up, down, left or down.
• Give your effect a description and an icon from a choice of emblems, a low-res one from your Steam library (if installed) or your own.

Device graphics are available for the following devices:

• ⌨️ Razer BlackWidow Chroma [ 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 ]
• ⌨️ Razer BlackWidow Elite [ 🇺🇸 ] -- thanks @beranat and @antarean!
• ⌨️ Razer DeathStalker Chroma -- thanks @rem3-1415926!
• ⌨️ Razer Huntsman Elite [ 🇩🇪 ] -- thanks @leifhelm!
• 🖱️ Razer Mamba Elite -- thanks @beranat!
• 🖱️ Razer Mamba Tournament Edition
• 💻 Razer Blade Stealth (2016) [ 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 ]
• 💻 Razer Blade (2018) [ 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 ]
• 💻 Razer Blade Pro (2019) [🇩🇪 ] -- thanks @Baiyah7o!
• Razer Firefly
• Razer Base Station Chroma

If your device isn't listed, the grid is always available. If you're lucky, there might be a graphic identical to your device already. Learn how to contribute device graphics.

Device Support

Polychromatic has a new objective to be vendor agnostic with a goal to have seamless integration between RGB brands. For now, this software continues to be compatible with OpenRazer:

• OpenRazer is no longer a hard dependency.
  • This software can run without OpenRazer installed, but will be limited.
• Add support for multizoned hardware
  • Including the logo, scroll wheel, and battery charging states.
• 🖱️🔋 Add support for battery status, sleep and low power modes.
• Support custom effects for all compatible hardware.
• Add shortcut to open mouse preferences for acceleration settings.
• Button to sync DPI ranges to compatible hardware.
  • Only a couple of devices support this in the firmware. For most mice, this option isn't available.
• Add information about macros and key remapping.

To improve your experience with OpenRazer, there is now:

• New troubleshooter for identifying installation problems.
• New configuration editor for editing ~/.config/openrazer/razer.conf, for options provided by the OpenRazer daemon, like:
  • Turning off the brightness when the screen is locked.
  • Sending battery status notifications.
  • Turning off persistence introduced in OpenRazer 3.0.

Tray Applet

• Overhauled with a new menu.
  • Implemented in a way that does not "crash" like v0.3.12's did on some distros.
• Custom effects and "Apply to All" can be set.
• Adds support for GTK Status Icon (legacy).
• New option to delay autostart.
  • For speedy systems, sometimes the menu or icon doesn't initialise as expected due to race conditions. Adding a delay for a few seconds can fix this.

New: Command Line

Are you a terminal warrior? Scripting kiddie? Introducing polychromatic-cli. You can set options (-o), parameters (-p), colours (-c) and more (-k) for all devices or just specific ones (-d, -s, -n).

polychromatic-cli --help

Other Changes

• There is now just one desktop launcher, which opens the Controller.
  • If your desktop supports it, right click for desktop actions, like tray applet and opening specific tabs.
• polychromatic-helper spawns for each device to run custom effects.
• polychromatic-helper --autostart takes care of autostarting the tray applet (enabled by default)
• New and updated icons.
• Font rendering has improved.
• New (partial) translations: 🇧🇷 pt_BR, 🇫🇷 fr_FR, 🇫🇮 fi_FI, 🇷🇺 ru, 🇳🇱 nl, 🇨🇳 zh_CN
  • Thank you to all past and recent translators for contributing!
  • Learn how to translate this application
• Change shebang to #!/usr/bin/python3
  • Prevents custom Python installations from interfering in some situations.
• For packagers:
  • Updated dependencies and scripts to reflect new code.
  • Change build system to meson/ninja.
  • Switch from lessc to sassc

Debian Packages

The application is now packaged modularly on Debian-based systems.

• If desired, you can just install a component exclusively, like polychromatic-tray-applet.
• polychromatic is a metapackage to install the complete set.

Known Issues

OpenRazer

At least 3.0.1 is recommended due to older bugs that may affect the operation of this software.

• There is an unused Gdk dependency in older versions of OpenRazer that may lock up this software up on some distributions.

Bugs in OpenRazer that will be fixed in 3.1.0:

• Devices with charging zones shows an error - https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer/commit/7a8b099035b885707217e42fbfc874e3b0a74cd2
• DeathAdder 3.5G shows an error - https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer/pull/1576
• Razer DeathStalker Chroma matrix dimensions were incorrect - https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer/commit/902aed4757ee557b1577c32e2029eda48f4e2c57

If this affects you, consider using the -git or daily package of OpenRazer until the next release.

There are some unresolved problems for some hardware:

• Pulsate effect doesn't work - https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer/issues/1575

---

If you haven't visited in a long while, Polychromatic can be found at https://polychromatic.app - also recently updated!

We also have documentation if you're looking to get involved or learn more about the project as well as OpenRazer.

🐦 We're on Twitter too: @polychromic_app

After having a bit of a hiatus developing the next "major" update to this application, it's time for a very minor release to fix some "paper cuts" in the stable version:

• Address misaligned button text on Ubuntu/Debian (due to fonts-play package).
• Fixed a hard to read DPI/Poll Rate label.
• Fix an issue causing a blank Preferences → Daemon screen.
• Add warnings if the old PPA is detected.

Ubuntu / Linux Mint users: The PPA has changed!

If you installed Polychromatic prior to around September 2017, there's been a bit of re-organisation since then regarding PPAs used for updating the software:

• lah7/polychromatic has moved to polychromatic/stable.
• lah7/polychromatic-daily has moved to polychromatic/daily

:warning: v0.3.12 will be the last update to the old PPA.

To make the transition:

1. Open Software & Updates and open the Other Software tab.

2. Find the "lah7/polychromatic" entry in the list and delete it.

3. Open the terminal and run:

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:polychromatic/stable
   sudo apt update
   

This release simply renames and points to the new naming used for the driver/daemon. Previously known as terrycain/razer-drivers.

OpenRazer

The version has been bumped to v2.0.0.

• The new website location is https://openrazer.github.io/
• The new place for the project is https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer

---

:warning: If you're using Ubuntu, you should to switch to the new driver/daemon repository, as you will get dependency errors and be unable to update the program.

Unless you are already using ppa:openrazer/stable, run these commands to make a clean switch:

sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/terrz-ubuntu-razerutils-*
sudo apt remove python3-razer razer-daemon razer-doc razer-kernel-modules-dkms
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openrazer/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install polychromatic openrazer-meta

A minor update to address a few issues, particularly after the daemon's last updat which caused a regression for Blade Stealth devices.

The changes are mainly for improved stability until the next major release, which is slowly tugging along. :hammer_and_wrench:

• Catch more exceptions in the Controller and Tray Applet to prevent missing items, both in the interface and under the hood.
• Internal code refactoring, namely the preferences page.
• Drop version dependency of WebKit2 >2.12 for Debian/Ubuntu.
• "Properly" add support for the starlight effect (where supported by keyboards via hardware)
• Bump preferences to revision 5, which cleans up how booleans were stored and pretty prints the JSON files.

This is a "quick" release to tweak the daemon's paths as they have changed in the daemon's latest v1.1.14 update.

• ~/.razer-service has become:
  • ~/.config/openrazer/ for storing the daemon's configuration.
  • ~/.local/share/openrazer/ for logs.

This release only contains a small but important change in the recently released v1.1.13 of the driver/daemon.

• Rename razer-service to razer-daemon. Thanks @SengokuKamuri (#95)

It's been a quiet couple of weeks, this minor release contains a few small things.

• Re-licensed as GPL 3.
• :de: Add German translation. (Thanks @BlauerHunger!)
  • Packages for Ubuntu already got this in time for v0.3.9.
• Tray: Do not show colours menu in tray if device doesn't support RGB.
• Controller: Fix profile matrix rows/cols for non-BW devices. (#92)
• Controller: Various fixes to prevent exceptions, including:
  • Determining username for "plugdev message". (#91)
  • Ensure slider for unknown poll rate. (#91)

More major improvements still to come! :clock1030:

This is a minor release, with some fixes and new device support.

Device Support

• Add option for changing "backlit" mice, e.g. Naga 2014. (#77)
• Add option for setting polling rate for mice.
• Limit DPI to values the device supports.

Applies to both Controller and Tray Applet.

Controller

• Add logic to check whether user is part of the plugdev group.
• Fix logic when detecting an out of date daemon.
• Requires sync_effects_enabled in daemon's config to be disabled. (#79)
• Fix garbled display when choosing an application (#82)
• Minor UI tweaks.

Tray Applet

• Fix wrong colour being selected for green variants. (e.g. BlackWidow Ultimate)
• Hide effects if device doesn't have any to show.

Both the Controller and Tray Applet now synchronise device states, so if you make tweaks in one while the other is running, they'll be reflected without needing to reload. :relieved:

The tray applet gets a lot of love in this update! :heart:

Tray Applet

• Completely overhauled.
• Only shows options relevant to that device.
• Improved support for devices that have separate logo/scroll lighting options.
• Shows the current status for effects, brightness, etc.
• Shows a visual list of your saved colours.
• (For mice) Now supports setting the DPI.
• Offers an option to restart the daemon.

Controller

• Fixed an issue when creating profiles based on an installed application.
• Macros, game modes and profiles only show if the device supports them.
• Preferences - Improved selection for changing icons.
• Preferences - Daemon options have been temporarily dropped, as the latest daemon does not read them.
• Ultimate (non-RGB) keyboards present shades of green.
• Refreshed UI improvements.
• Miscellaneous fixes under the hood.

Feature Dropped: "Start-up Settings"

The tray applet use to be responsible for setting an effect, brightness or profile when it first runs. This has been dropped temporarily. It was unreliable, especially as it applied them to the first device.

Rest assured, this feature will be coming back much improved in the next major release. :+1:

Even more packages! :package:

If you're a Fedora or openSUSE user, you'll be pleased to know you now have packages available! Thanks to @z3ntu for setting this up. See the README for instructions.