🌓 Setting the Neovim background from the Gnome system theme

I wanted to set my Neovim background conditionally based on the Gnome system theme (light/dark).

I came up with the following snippet, which lives in my init.lua

local Job = require'plenary.job'

job = Job:new({
  command = 'gsettings',
  args = { 'get', 'org.gnome.desktop.interface', 'color-scheme' },
})


if job:sync()[1] == "'prefer-dark'" then
  vim.opt.background = 'dark'
else
  vim.opt.background = 'light'
end

The downside here is you have to re-source your init.lua after changing the system theme, so the process isn't automatic. I wonder whether I'd be able to run a background process to poll for this value (or subscribe to events) to automatically change the theme.

I plan to play around getting this working on MacOS (which I use for work) as well.