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Themes

Tonal Slate, theme switching and ANSI remapping.

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One palette, every surface

A TDE theme is a semantic palette, not a colour scheme file. Components never ask for a hex value; they ask for a role — accent, danger, surface, border, input_bg — and the active theme answers. That is why changing the theme restyles the whole desktop, chrome and apps alike, in one step.

The built-in palettes

Sixteen palettes ship in the binary. tonal-slate is the product default; the Appearance picker exposes the same canonical catalog used by configuration, the UI Demo and the capture pipeline.

Name	Notes
`tonal-slate`	Default. Cool slate surfaces, frost text and a soft green accent.
`editorial-paper`	Warm e-paper presentation; aliases include `eink` and `paper`.
`editorial-ink`	Dark editorial palette; aliases include `midnight` and `dark`.
`tonal-porcelain`	Light tonal UI.
`tonal-graphite`	Dark graphite tonal UI.
`tonal-sand`	Warm light tonal UI.
`macos`	Light macOS-inspired palette.
`macos-dark`	Dark macOS-inspired palette.
`ubuntu`	Ubuntu-inspired dark palette.
`windows-xp`	Windows XP-inspired light palette.
`dracula`	Dracula editor palette.
`nord`	Nord editor palette.
`gruvbox`	Gruvbox dark palette.
`solarized-dark`	Solarized Dark palette.
`catppuccin-mocha`	Catppuccin Mocha palette.
`monokai`	Monokai editor palette.

You select one either as a mode or by name:

~/.config/tde/config.toml

[theme]
mode = "tonal-slate" # product default
# name = "gruvbox"   # takes precedence over mode

mode is the stable three-palette cycle. tonal-slate accepts slate and default; editorial-paper accepts eink, e-ink, paper and kaleido; editorial-ink accepts midnight, dark and tde. name accepts any of the sixteen canonical ids, their labels and aliases, or a custom file at ~/.config/tde/themes/<name>.toml. A theme that fails to load prints a warning and falls back to mode rather than refusing to start.

Slashes, backslashes and .. in a theme name are rejected, so name can never read a file outside the themes directory.

Switching

Three ways, all live — no restart:

Control Center → Appearance. Lists every built-in plus every file in your themes directory. Arrows and Enter, or a click. The selection is persisted.
Alt+Shift+E. Cycles Tonal Slate → Editorial Paper → Editorial Ink → Tonal Slate, clears any named override and persists the new mode. Shift is part of the shortcut so plain Alt+E stays free for apps.
config.toml. Edit [theme] and restart.

e-Ink is a rendering mode, not just colours

Every theme carries an eink flag. When it is set, TDE runs a post-process pass over the entire final frame — its own chrome and every hosted terminal app — and collapses each cell's foreground and background onto a warm paper-to-ink ramp.

Low-chroma colours are mapped by luminance onto five paper tones; anything with real colour in it snaps to the nearest entry on a small colour ramp. Terminal default colours resolve to paper for backgrounds and ink for foregrounds.

The practical effect: a third-party TUI that paints its own aggressive truecolor palette still reads as e-paper inside TDE, without that app knowing anything about themes. On Tonal Slate and every other non-e-Ink palette the pass is a no-op and colours pass through untouched.

Custom themes

Drop a file in ~/.config/tde/themes/. The stem is the name you put in theme.name, so office.toml becomes name = "office".

A custom theme inherits every role it does not set from a base palette, so a five-line file is a complete, valid theme:

~/.config/tde/themes/office.toml

base = "tonal-slate" # omitted base also inherits Tonal Slate

[colors]
accent = "#3b5bdb"
accent_fg = "#ffffff"
surface = "#f7f5ee"
warn = "#b46b00"
danger = "#b3261e"

Colour spellings

Anywhere a colour is accepted, four forms work:

Form	Example
Hex	`"#7aa2f7"`
Truecolor RGB	`"122,162,247"`
Palette index	`"4"` or `"idx:4"`
Basic name	`"blue"`

An unparsable colour is an error, not a silent fallback.

The `[colors]` roles

Role	Used for
`bg`, `fg`	Window content background and body text.
`dim`, `bright`	Muted labels and hints; headings and focused values.
`accent`, `accent_fg`	The primary action colour and the text drawn on it.
`sel_bg`, `sel_fg`	Selected rows.
`surface`	Panels, window frame fill, menus.
`backdrop`	The desktop behind all windows.
`menu_bg`	Menus and popovers.
`success`, `warn`, `danger`	Status colours.
`icon`	A secondary decorative accent for glyphs and tags.
`input_bg`, `input_fg`	Editable fields.
`border_on`, `border_off`	Focused and unfocused window borders.
`title_on`, `title_off`	Focused and unfocused window titles.
`btn_off`, `btn_bg`	Inactive button glyphs and idle chip fill.
`shadow`	Window drop shadows.
`pill_on`, `pill_off`	The toolbar pill behind the window buttons.

Setting accent without accent_fg re-derives a readable foreground rather than inheriting a clashing pair from the base palette.

Per-app themes

A few apps carry their own theme override — TDE Code and AI Chat resolve a theme name for their own window without touching the desktop palette. Everything else follows the one global theme.

Configuration — the [theme] table and theme files in the config reference.
Control Center — the Appearance panel.
Terminal graphics — what your terminal contributes to how all of this looks.
Design system — how components consume the palette.