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What it styles

btop reads .theme files from ~/.config/btop/themes and uses them to color every panel, meter, and graph it draws. This theme maps the full set of theme keys onto the family palette so the dashboard reads with the same vocabulary as the editor and terminal ports.

File	Purpose
slatewave.theme	The palette — drop into btop's user themes directory and select via color_theme

Highlights:

• One ramp for every meter and graph — temp, cpu, mem, net, and the process activity column all use teal-300 → amber-400 → rose-400. Read it as: more rose = more activity.
• Slate-600 chrome — every box outline (cpu_box, mem_box, net_box, proc_box, div_line) uses the same slate-600, so the four panels read as a single coherent grid rather than four separate widgets.
• Teal accents — panel labels (¹cpu, ²mem, ³proc), keyboard shortcuts (hi_fg), and the proc_misc color all use teal-300, matching the focus ring in every editor port.
• Slate-700 / teal-300 selection — the active row in the process list highlights slate-700 + teal-300, mirroring the list.activeSelectionBackground / list.activeSelectionForeground pair from the VSCode port.
• Transparent by default — main_bg = "" so btop inherits the terminal background. Pair with any of the Slatewave terminal ports for matched chrome, or set theme_background = false in btop.conf for a fully transparent dashboard.

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Requirements

• btop ≥ 1.2 — install guide. Earlier versions of btop are missing some of the theme keys this file sets (process_*, graph_text, meter_bg).
• A 24-bit / true-color terminal. Set truecolor = true in ~/.config/btop/btop.conf (the default). At 256 colors, the teal/amber/rose ramp collapses and the gradient meters lose their middle stop.

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Installation

Drop the theme into btop's themes dir

mkdir -p ~/.config/btop/themes
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kevinlangleyjr/btop-slatewave/main/slatewave.theme \
  -o ~/.config/btop/themes/slatewave.theme

Or: clone the repo and symlink

If you'd rather track updates with git, clone the repo and symlink the theme file in. btop only scans the top level of its themes directory, so the symlink (rather than putting the clone inside themes/) is the path of least resistance.

git clone https://github.com/kevinlangleyjr/btop-slatewave.git ~/.config/btop/btop-slatewave
ln -sf ~/.config/btop/btop-slatewave/slatewave.theme \
  ~/.config/btop/themes/slatewave.theme

# Pull updates with: git -C ~/.config/btop/btop-slatewave pull

Activate the theme

Either edit ~/.config/btop/btop.conf directly:

color_theme = "slatewave"

Or do it in one shot from the command line:

sed -i.bak 's/^color_theme = .*/color_theme = "slatewave"/' ~/.config/btop/btop.conf

Or interactively — launch btop, press Esc → Options → arrow over to color_theme and pick slatewave from the list.

Verify

btop

You should see:

• ¹cpu, ²mem, ³proc panel labels in teal-300, sitting on slate-600 box outlines
• Every meter and graph filled with the same teal → amber → rose gradient
• The currently-selected process row highlighted in slate-700 + teal-300
• Keyboard shortcuts in the top/bottom bars in slate-300, with their hotkey letters in teal-300

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Palette

The same palette as the rest of the Slatewave family. Every color resolves to a semantic role, so the dashboard's reading is consistent with the editors and terminals.

Foundation — slate

	Hex	Tailwind	Where
	#1e293b	slate-800	optional opaque panel bg (set main_bg to use)
	#334155	slate-700	selected_bg, meter_bg (meter track)
	#475569	slate-600	every box outline + div_line
	#64748b	slate-500	inactive_fg
	#94a3b8	slate-400	graph_text (overlay readouts on graphs)
	#cbd5e1	slate-300	tab labels, secondary text
	#e2e8f0	slate-200	main_fg, title (default text)

Signature — teal · accents — amber, rose

	Hex	Tailwind	Role
	#5eead4	teal-300	hi_fg, proc_misc, selected_fg, panel labels, gradient start
	#fbbf24	amber-400	gradient mid — middle of every meter/graph ramp
	#fb7185	rose-400	gradient end — top of every meter/graph ramp

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Theme key mapping

Every key in slatewave.theme and what it controls:

Key	Color	Semantic role
main_bg	"" (empty)	Panel background — empty for terminal transparency. Set to #1e293b for opaque slate panels.
main_fg	#e2e8f0	Default text color across all panels
title	#e2e8f0	Box / panel title text
hi_fg	#5eead4	Highlight color for keyboard shortcut letters
selected_bg	#334155	Selected process row background
selected_fg	#5eead4	Selected process row foreground
inactive_fg	#64748b	Disabled / inactive text
graph_text	#94a3b8	Readout values overlaid on graphs
meter_bg	#334155	Unfilled portion of meters
proc_misc	#5eead4	Mini cpu graphs in process box, details memory graph, status text
cpu_box, mem_box, net_box, proc_box	#475569	All four box outlines (kept identical for grid coherence)
div_line	#475569	Divider lines between sub-panels
temp_*, cpu_*, free_*, cached_*, available_*, used_*, download_*, upload_*, process_*	#5eead4 → #fbbf24 → #fb7185	Every gradient ramp uses the same three stops

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Customize

btop's themes are plain key/value files — fork and edit. The two changes most people make:

Opaque slate panels instead of transparent

Edit slatewave.theme and set:

theme[main_bg]="#1e293b"

Then make sure theme_background = true in btop.conf so btop actually fills the background.

Inverse ramps for "free" meters

This theme uses the same teal → rose ramp on every meter, including free_* and available_*, so the meter color tracks the fill level rather than the semantic. If you'd rather have "more free = more teal" (good = teal, bad = rose), swap the start and end on those keys:

theme[free_start]="#fb7185"
theme[free_mid]="#fbbf24"
theme[free_end]="#5eead4"

theme[available_start]="#fb7185"
theme[available_mid]="#fbbf24"
theme[available_end]="#5eead4"

After editing, restart btop (Esc → Quit → relaunch) — it caches theme parses on launch.

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Slatewave family

One palette. Every tool.

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

See getslatewave.com for the full family.

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Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. For palette tweaks, please include a before/after screenshot of btop against a representative workload (something with both idle cores and active processes — the gradient is most obvious when meters span the full range) so the visual tradeoff is obvious.

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License

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