General question: Format of a theme file / color

[assayire]

I have searched for a quite a while to understand the format of the theme file particularly the color.

For example, how do i parse the color under, say ANSIBlueColor:

<key>ANSIBlueColor</key>
<data>
YnBsaX...
</data>

Looks like the data (color value) is base64 encoded which when I decode gives some binary data. So, how do I parse the binary data to extract the color values for ANSIBlueColor?

Would be a huge help if you can shed some light on this. Thanks 🙏

[lysyi3m]

@assayire take a look at tools/iterm2terminal.swift script we wrote a while ago to convert iTerm's *.itermcolors themes into macOS Terminal format.

especially on these lines https://github.com/lysyi3m/macos-terminal-themes/blob/master/tools/iterm2terminal.swift#L84-L90

in short, the answer is: data here is a serialized { color: NSColor } object, which returned by NSKeyedArchiver.archivedData() and the "format" is - if I remember correctly, an Apple's proprietary "binary plist" format.

I'm not sure about solution to decode it using 3rd party tools, but something like NSKeyedUnarchiver.unarchiveObject(...) might work