Themes

Themes (SPC›t›t) lists every theme as a word to click; Theme <name> sets one anywhere, and the same line in the startup file keeps it. NextColor steps through the themes in this order: the native themes first, then acme, lapis and lapis_plain, the faithful ports, the legacy helix and dark, and the palettes imported from helix and zed. orchard is the default. lapis draws its ornament in the GUI; lapis_plain is the same theme on flat grounds, keeping its framed and shadowed tags and its file-name shadow.

Every theme

The native themes

The six classic-inspired ones (forge to clay) keep a recognisable syntax identity but are not exact ports; their sources are in vendor/themes/, and they claim no upstream affiliation. The focused pane’s and column’s tags shift tone on tone rather than invert: dark palettes keep dark tags, light ones light tags. The file name in a pane’s path, and +Search and the like, take a distinct hue at the same brightness as the tag text; a terminal’s tag tints its Tty word instead.

Every native palette sets its own ANSI colours, so a terminal’s indexed colours belong to it; Filter maps a program’s true colours through the theme too. Normal text, syntax, comments, diagnostics and ANSI foregrounds keep a contrast of at least 4.5:1 against the page (7:1 in ink and daybreak), comments above 5:1; line numbers sit quieter, between 2.5:1 and 4:1. Tag, focused-tag, selection and search text are held to the same floors on their own grounds. ANSI black is exempt, since programs use it as a background. These are checks of the palettes, not a promise about a program’s own escape sequences or the scene effects. FocusTint (on) and SyntaxBold (off) toggle the focused tag’s tint and bold keywords.

Faithful ports

Well-known themes taken as close to their originals as pardes can draw them: every colour the original has (page, text, selection, syntax, line numbers, diagnostics, terminal ANSI) is its own, read out of its files, and each theme file cites the file and line of every value. pardes has one colour each for keywords, strings, numbers and comments, so a theme that splits a kind keeps its main one. A pane’s tag is the original’s window bar (vim’s StatusLine, emacs’s mode-line) or, in a tabbed editor, its tab. Where a chrome colour misses one of pardes’s floors (rules 1.5:1 off the page, the focused tag 1.5:1 off the unfocused one on a dark page and 1.25:1 on a light one, tag text 4.5:1), only that colour moves, just far enough, and the file’s header says so; text, syntax and ANSI never move. An imported theme whose name a port now holds is kept with _helix added (dracula_helix).

Making your own

DumpThemes writes every compiled theme to <config dir>/themes/builtin/<name>.zon. Copy one to themes/mine.zon, change its .name, and run ThemeFile themes/mine.zon (relative to the config directory). Where the host reloads files, saving it updates the theme at once; a malformed save keeps the last good version, and Theme <name> stops the watch. A ThemeFile that fails to load says why in words, a ZON error with its line (line 3: expected ','), and changes nothing: the theme shown stays, and /ctl and DumpConfig still name the file that last loaded, or none. Restore and pardes -l load a dump’s ThemeFile again, as a /ctl write of it does, and one that fails there changes nothing either. The format is pardes.Theme as std.zon.stringify writes it, a complete theme with no inheritance.

The required roles: nullable bg and fg, sel_bg, sel_fg, tag_bg, tag_fg, box, box_dim, kw, str, num, comment, lineno, scroll_track, scroll_thumb, and a nullable 16-entry palette. Each is an RGB triple (.search_bg = .{ 0x57, 0x47, 0x2a }). The optional roles take null, so older files stay valid: