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Themes

A theme controls the colors Rune draws with: the editor, the UI, and syntax highlighting. Rune ships a set of themes out of the box, and you can add your own entirely from configuration.

How themes work​

Rune renders everything through a small named color palette (the standard terminal color names like red, green, blue, and so on). A theme is simply a set of overrides for those names: it remaps each name to the value you want. Because the whole interface references colors by name, remapping the palette re-themes everything at once, even your terminal's colors!

Themes live under the gui section of your config:

  • gui.themes is a catalog of named themes.
  • gui.default_theme picks which one is active at startup.

The default configuration ships sixteen themes and starts on romero.

A theme decides what each color name looks like; it does not decide which parts of your code use which name. For per-capture control over code colors, see Syntax Highlighting.

Switching themes​

Change the active theme at any time with the guitheme command:

guitheme carmack

Run guitheme with no argument to return to the default. To preview the named colors live, use the colorPalette command.

What a theme overrides​

A theme entry maps color names to values. Each value can be a hex string ("#ff2400") or another known color name ("darkorange").

Three keys are special:

KeySets
foregroundthe default text color
backgroundthe default background color
cursorthe cursor color

Every other key remaps one of the named palette colors. These are essentially the 8 regular ANSI colors plus the 8 bold (bright) ones, 16 in total:

RegularDefaultBoldDefault
blackgray
maroonred
greenlime
oliveyellow
navyblue
purplefuchsia
tealaqua
silverwhite

Creating a theme​

Add a new entry under gui.themes and point gui.default_theme at it:

gui:
  default_theme: mytheme
  themes:
    mytheme:
      foreground: "#e0e0e0"
      background: "#101010"
      cursor: "#ff8800"
      black: "#101010"
      white: "#e0e0e0"
      red: "#cc3333"
      green: "#33aa55"
      yellow: "#d6a23a"
      blue: "#3a78d6"
      fuchsia: "#c06fd0"
      aqua: "#3ac6c6"
      gray: "#202020"
      silver: "#888888"
      maroon: "#8a2a2a"
      olive: "#9a8030"
      navy: "#2a3a6a"
      purple: "#6a3a9a"
      lime: "#5fd06f"
      teal: "#3a9a9a"

You do not have to set every color. Any name you leave out keeps its current value, so a theme can be as small as a couple of overrides.

Rune loads the themes in your config at startup. After adding one, restart Rune or open a new window with guiwindownew, then activate it with guitheme mytheme, or set default_theme to it to use it at startup.

Share your theme​

To share a theme, publish it as a Rune package in a public GitHub repository. A theme-only package needs just two files at the repository root:

.
├── config.yaml
└── README.md

Put your theme under gui.themes in config.yaml, using the same color names and values as in Creating a theme. For example:

config.yaml
gui:
  themes:
    mytheme:
      foreground: "#e0e0e0"
      background: "#101010"
      cursor: "#ff8800"
      blue: "#3a78d6"

For a repository you can copy, see the Redmond 95 theme, which ships the redmond95 palette as a package.

Use README.md to show a screenshot, describe the palette, and tell readers how to install and activate it. You do not need an extension or a build step for a theme package. Add the rune and theme GitHub repository topics so we can automatically include your theme in the packages section of the Rune website. After pushing the repository, others can install it from the Rune console:

pkg install github.com/ernestrc/rune-theme-redmond95
guitheme redmond95

Installing merges the theme into gui.themes and makes it available to guitheme immediately, with no restart. It does not change the active theme or gui.default_theme. Users can select it with guitheme or set gui.default_theme: redmond95 in their own config to use it at startup. See Packages for installation and versioning details.

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