Themes

Novalis themes come in two layers, both token-driven:

• the terminal palette: the 16 ANSI colours + fg/bg the grid renders with;
• the chrome palette: title bar, sidebars, overlays; derived from three seeds (bg, fg, accent) into a calm elevation ladder, so every surface stays in one hue family.

Built-in themes

Tokyo Night (the canonical chrome), Tokyo Night Light, Dracula, Catppuccin Mocha, Nord, and Novalis, the house theme seeded from the app icon: deep hull navy, cream text, engine-orange accent.

Pick one in the theme picker (⌘P → theme); the whole app re-derives live, no restart.

Theme from an image

Feed Novalis a picture (a wallpaper, a painting, a film still) and it extracts a palette and builds a full theme from it. A Caspar-David-Friedrich moonrise makes a surprisingly good terminal.

The one-accent rule

Chrome themes deliberately carry one accent colour, used only for focus, active state, and links. It’s why Novalis reads calm where other tools read like a status board. If you build a custom theme, you only choose six colours; the ladder does the rest:

# a chrome theme is six seeds
bg      = "#14273c"
fg      = "#f2ead3"
accent  = "#f08c28"
success = "#8fbf6f"
warning = "#f2b13d"
error   = "#e8604a"

CRT mode

For the romantics: a default-off CRT pass; scanlines, vignette, and a real full-screen wgpu shader with barrel distortion behind config.shaders. Your terminal, but remembered.