TUI Theming

The TUI ships with 40+ built-in themes, all defined in src/cli/tui/theme.ts. The active theme is a live singleton (umbraTheme) that every Ink component reads — switching themes takes effect immediately without restart.

Theme object shape (UmbraTheme)

Token	Used for
frame	Panel borders, window chrome
frameDim	Dim/inactive panel chrome
accent	Primary highlights, active selections
accentSoft	Secondary highlights
skillHighlight	Skill invocation markers
text	Main body text
muted	Secondary/metadata text
success	Positive outcomes, check marks
warning	Non-fatal alerts
danger	Errors, denied permissions
code	Inline code, tool names
thinking	Extended reasoning / thinking output
userBackground	User message bubble background
assistantBackground	Assistant message bubble background
systemBackground	Outermost terminal background

Built-in themes

umbra (default), aura, ayu, carbonfox, catppuccin, catppuccin-frappe, catppuccin-macchiato, cobalt2, cursor, dracula, everforest, flexoki, github, gruvbox, kanagawa, lucent-orng, material, matrix, mercury, monokai, nightowl, nord, one-dark, opencode, orng, osaka-jade, palenight, rosepine, solarized, synthwave84, tokyonight, vercel, vesper, zenburn, vscode-default, classic, dark-pro, pastel, hacker, retro, snow, midnight

Switching themes

/theme dracula         # switch in the TUI
/theme                 # open picker

The selected theme is persisted to ~/.umbra/runtime-preferences.json under the theme key and restored on next launch. Fallback is always umbra if the stored name is not found.

Adding a custom theme

Add an entry to the THEMES record in src/cli/tui/theme.ts with all 15 required tokens and rebuild. Custom themes follow the same lifecycle as built-ins.