explaingit

terofale/outer-wilds-grub-theme

★ 16ShellAudience · generalComplexity · 2/5ActiveSetup · moderate

TLDR

A GNU GRUB boot menu theme that restyles the Linux boot screen to look like the Outer Wilds main menu, installed by a bash script.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((outer-wilds-grub-theme))
    Inputs
      install.sh
      lang flag
      theme.txt edits
    Outputs
      Themed GRUB menu
      17 language prompts
      Centered entries
    Use Cases
      Skin the boot screen
      Pick installer language
      Center menu entries
    Tech Stack
      Shell
      GRUB
      Bash script
      Theme files

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Replace the default Linux GRUB boot menu with an Outer Wilds inspired skin on a personal machine.

USE CASE 2

Install the theme in a chosen language non-interactively by passing the --lang flag to install.sh.

USE CASE 3

Center the boot entries horizontally and vertically by editing grub.cfg and theme.txt.

USE CASE 4

Use this repository as a starting point for building a different game-themed GRUB skin.

Tech stack

ShellBashGRUB

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Touches /boot/grub on the host system, so you need a Linux machine with GRUB and a willingness to edit boot config files.

In plain English

This repository is a visual theme for GNU GRUB, the boot menu that many Linux machines show before the operating system actually starts. Specifically, it restyles that menu to look like the main menu of the video game Outer Wilds, so when the computer powers on, the boot screen has the look of the game instead of the default text-on-black GRUB interface. The theme ships with translations for the installer prompts in seventeen languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, both simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Latvian, Norwegian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Rusyn. The README notes that the translations were generated through Google Translate and invites users to open an issue if any wording looks wrong. Installation is a shell script. The user clones the repository, changes into the directory, reviews install.sh, and runs it with bash install.sh. There is an optional --lang argument, for example bash install.sh --lang French, that skips the interactive language picker. Uninstalling is a matching bash uninstall.sh. The README also describes two optional tweaks. The boot menu entries can be centered horizontally and decorated with arrow-style selectors that look like a chevron pointing in at the entry name, either by editing /boot/grub/grub.cfg by hand or by running the included renameEntries.sh script. The author notes that the rename script was partially vibe-coded and that anyone uncomfortable with that can edit grub.cfg manually instead. For vertical centering, the user adjusts the number in the top attribute of the boot_menu component inside /boot/grub/themes/outer-wilds-grub-theme/theme.txt. The README credits an existing Ultrakill GRUB theme as the starting base for this one. There is no license file mentioned in the README excerpt and no list of supported distributions, but the install path assumes a standard GRUB layout under /boot/grub.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Walk me through running bash install.sh for Terofale/outer-wilds-grub-theme on Ubuntu, including what to check before letting it touch /boot/grub.
Prompt 2
My GRUB menu still looks default after running install.sh from outer-wilds-grub-theme. List the diagnostic commands and likely fixes for Arch and Ubuntu.
Prompt 3
Rewrite renameEntries.sh from outer-wilds-grub-theme as a safer Python script that previews the changes to /boot/grub/grub.cfg before writing.
Prompt 4
Modify outer-wilds-grub-theme to add a new installer language by extending the INSTALLER_LANGS variable in install.sh. Show the full diff.
Prompt 5
Generate a uninstall verification script that confirms outer-wilds-grub-theme files under /boot/grub/themes are fully removed after running bash uninstall.sh.
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Generated 2026-05-22 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.