Themes
August 16, 2026 · View on GitHub
16 built-in palettes, switchable anytime with /theme (no args opens the picker with the current theme marked ●) or /theme <name>. Custom themes: /theme custom:<name>.
Built-in Themes
| Theme | Background | Description |
|---|---|---|
pastel | dark | Gentle pastels. Anime-inspired, high-contrast, low-saturation multicolor cards. |
cyberpunk | dark | Cyberpunk. Neon, extreme contrast, flashy. |
observatory | dark | Five-element stars. Traditional Chinese five-element palette on a dark star-lord base. |
midnight | dark | GitHub dark. Minimal neutral grays, crisp. |
starfield | dark | Constellations. Rivet-native star-map aesthetics: sky-blue primary with nebula-purple accents. |
tianshu | dark | Ink-black night. 95% ink gray with star-gold primary and cinnabar user accents; restrained. |
claude | dark | Port of the official Claude Code TUI palette. Classic orange. |
ziwei | dark | Ziwei star emperor. Cinnabar-red markers on imperial-purple accents, classical Chinese star-map aesthetics. |
slate | dark | Calm slate gray. A single cool Teal primary, achromatic structure, low glare for long sessions. |
dawn | dark | Dawn star morning. Cyan-blue borders, warm-gold titles, fog-gray body, close to the Tianshu splash. |
antigravity | dark | Codex style. Cool cyan accent, bright gray structural text, modern and restrained. |
cobalt | dark | Cobalt cool neutral (default style). oklch-blended with a crisp lightness ramp. |
graphite | dark | Graphite ice-cyan (professional default). Neutral grays + a single ice-cyan accent; low-saturation semantic colors for long coding sessions. |
gemini | dark | Gemini style. Nebula glow gradient (cool indigo + nebula purple) with aurora mint. |
paper | light | Paper white. For light terminals; semantic colors deepened and brightened, indigo accent. |
light-ansi | light | Light ANSI. A clean 16-color build that follows the terminal's own palette; light-background friendly. |
Terminal Detection & Degradation
- Auto detection: on startup, dark/light background is chosen via auto theme detection.
- 16-color degradation: terminals without truecolor automatically fall back to an ANSI 16-color mapping of the semantic colors.
- ASCII degradation: on legacy terminals, emoji icons (
📁etc.) degrade to ASCII (~) for stable width. - No rendering breaks at any terminal width: narrow widths drop minor segments progressively; extreme narrow truncates the model segment.
Custom Themes
/theme custom:<name> uses a custom palette. Definitions live in src/theme-palettes.ts (semantic tokens → color values + background + description). description is the single source of truth for the /theme picker — new themes must carry one.
Themes & Readability
- Semantic colors (primary/secondary/success/warning/error/dim/muted, etc.) keep tool cards, red/green diffs, approval cards, and panels readable under any theme.
- Dim-level information (reasoning channels, turn summaries, subagent terminal lines) stays legible on light themes too.