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What it styles

Slatewave for Alfred is a single .alfredappearance preset tuned against Alfred 5's full appearance schema. It sets:

• Window — slate #282c34 at 90% opacity with a 20pt blur, so Alfred feels like a frosted pane of the Slatewave editor hovering above your desktop
• Border — slate-800 #1e293b, matching editorGroup.border in the VSCode theme
• Search field — 36pt System Light on a transparent background, #e2e8f0 foreground, so the query text reads identically to the VSCode editor foreground
• Selected result — slate-700 #334155 background with the title in teal #5eead4, mirroring VSCode's list.activeSelectionBackground / list.activeSelectionForeground pair
• Unselected result — slate-300 #cbd5e1 title, slate-500 #64748b subtext, for a calm, low-fatigue read
• Shortcut hint — slate-500 #64748b → teal #5eead4 on selection, echoing the accent bloom used in the VSCode activity bar
• Scrollbar — slate-600 #475569 at 60% alpha, matching scrollbarSlider.background

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Installation

Alfred extras (one-click)

The fastest path — Slatewave is listed on the official Alfred extras gallery:

→ Add Slatewave to Alfred

Click Add to Alfred on that page; Alfred opens Settings → Appearance with Slatewave pre-selected, ready to import.

Import the theme manually

1. Download Slatewave.alfredappearance.
2. Double-click the file — macOS will hand it to Alfred, which opens Settings → Appearance with Slatewave pre-selected.
3. Click Import to confirm. Slatewave appears in your theme list.

From a local clone

git clone https://github.com/kevinlangleyjr/alfred-slatewave
open alfred-slatewave/Slatewave.alfredappearance

Opening the file with Alfred running will offer to import it directly.

Recommended appearance settings

The preset is self-contained, but these Alfred-wide settings pair well with it:

• Settings → Appearance → Options — enable Hide hat on Alfred window for a cleaner top edge
• Settings → Appearance → Options — set Show shortcuts to your preference; Slatewave's shortcut slot is tuned for visibility
• Settings → Features → Default Results — keep Show subtext on; Slatewave styles the subtext slot as a faint slate-500 so it never competes with the title
• macOS → System Settings → Displays — Slatewave assumes a dark desktop. If you run Alfred over a light background, the 90% opacity window will pick up the underlying colors and the slate palette will read cooler

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Palette

Slatewave shares its palette with the companion themes. The anchor colors:

	Hex	Tailwind	Role
	#282c34	—	window background
	#1e293b	slate-800	window border
	#334155	slate-700	selected result background
	#475569	slate-600	scrollbar
	#64748b	slate-500	subtext, unselected shortcut
	#94a3b8	slate-400	selected subtext
	#cbd5e1	slate-300	unselected result title
	#e2e8f0	slate-200	search field text
	#5eead4	teal-300	selected result title, selected shortcut

Slot mapping

Mirrors the list.* / editor.* block from vscode-slatewave so Alfred's row states line up with VSCode's file-tree selection states.

Alfred slot	Color	VSCode analogue
window.color	#282c34E6	editor.background
window.borderColor	#1e293bFF	editorGroup.border
search.text.color	#e2e8f0FF	input.foreground / editor.foreground
result.text.color	#cbd5e1FF	sideBar.foreground
result.text.colorSelected	#5eead4FF	list.activeSelectionForeground
result.backgroundSelected	#334155B3	list.activeSelectionBackground
result.subtext.color	#64748bFF	descriptionForeground (faint)
result.shortcut.colorSelected	#5eead4FF	list.highlightForeground
scrollbar.color	#47556999	scrollbarSlider.background

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Customize

.alfredappearance is plain JSON. To override a single slot without forking, open Alfred → Settings → Appearance, right-click Slatewave → Duplicate Theme, then tweak the copy via Alfred's UI — changes apply live and the original Slatewave stays pristine so future updates can be re-imported.

To fork the preset itself: open Slatewave.alfredappearance in any text editor. Every color is an #RRGGBBAA string (8-digit hex with alpha); every size is in points. The schema is flat — alfredtheme.window, alfredtheme.search, alfredtheme.result, alfredtheme.separator, alfredtheme.scrollbar — so edits are local and easy to diff.

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Slatewave family

One palette. Every tool.

• Editors — VSCode · JetBrains · Xcode · Sublime Text · Zed · Neovim · NvChad · Helix
• Terminals — Alacritty · Ghostty · iTerm2 · kitty · Warp · WezTerm · Windows Terminal
• Prompts — Oh My Posh · Powerlevel10k · Starship
• Multiplexer — tmux
• CLI — bat · delta · LSD · btop
• Notes — Obsidian · Logseq · MarkEdit · Anytype
• Launchers — Raycast
• Chat — Slack

See getslatewave.com for the full family.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. For palette changes, include a before/after screenshot of Alfred with the same query showing (a) an empty search, (b) a multi-row result list with at least one selected row, and (c) a row with subtext and a shortcut hint, so the visual tradeoff is obvious across all three states.

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License

WTFPL — Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License. See LICENSE.