Live reloading nvim theme

For my system i have a collection of scripts to toggle between themes similar to what omarchy has become. With its new hype i decided to fix some of the things that didnt bothered me but wasnt great. One of them was nvim live reloading theme. Before whenever i changed themes, i had to restart nvim, but thats not the case anymore.

First of all a few things of how i have nvim setup. I have a $NVIM_CONFIG/lua/theme.lua file with the name of the colorscheme exported that i change with the script. For example return "catppuccin-latte". Then in my init.lua file i have vim.cmd.colorscheme(require("theme")).

The only thing missing was to retrigger that function whenever the file changed. To do this i decided to follow some common pattern that is listen to the USR1 signal. Luckily the lua api makes this easy. Thanks to fitrh on reddit for the signal hook code and to Vivian De Smedt on stackexchange on how to reload required modules.

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("Signal", {
  pattern = "SIGUSR1",
  group = vim.api.nvim_create_augroup("toggle_bg_on_SIGUSR1", {}),
  callback = function()
		package.loaded.theme = nil
		vim.cmd.colorscheme(require("theme"))
    vim.schedule(function()
      -- without this, nvim window need to be focused for the effect take into account
      vim.cmd("redraw!")
    end)
  end,
  nested = true, -- allow this autocmd to trigger `OptionSet background` event
})

Now its just a matter of running kill -s SIGUSR1 $(pidof nvim) whenever i change themes.