Themes and Styling

Themes & Styling

Tuim comes with carefully tuned syntax and UI styling designed to deliver clean contrast and readable widgets across all supported terminal emulators.

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1. Default Theme: VS Code Dark Modern

Out of the box, fresh installations default to VS Code Dark Modern:

• Clean, balanced contrast between code syntax, UI borders, sidebar lists, and the status footer.
• Fully tuned for both 24-bit Truecolor terminal emulators and terminal multiplexers.
• Automated contrast regression tests ensure readability of active, inactive, and focused UI elements.

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2. System Theme: Following the Omarchy Desktop Palette

Tuim includes an innovative System (follow desktop) theme mode that automatically synchronizes Tuim's colors with your desktop environment:

How It Works

• Tuim monitors the Omarchy color specification file at:

  $XDG_STATE_HOME/omarchy/current/theme/colors.toml
  (Fallback: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/omarchy/current/theme/colors.toml)
  

• Whenever your desktop theme changes (e.g. switching between light/dark or rotating accent palettes), Tuim parses the new palette and updates editor syntax, sidebar backgrounds, selection highlights, and borders live without requiring a restart.
• If the palette file is absent or temporarily invalid at startup, Tuim gracefully defaults to safe built-in colors while continuing to watch for the file.

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3. Font Icons & Portable Symbols

Tuim adapts to your terminal font environment:

Nerd Font Icons

If your terminal emulator uses a font with Nerd Font glyphs installed (e.g., JetBrainsMono Nerd Font, FiraCode Nerd Font):

• File types display recognizable graphical icons (Zig, Python, Rust, Lua, Git status indicators).

Portable Symbols Mode

If you are working on a machine, container, or remote SSH session without a Nerd Font installed:

1. Open F1 → Settings → Appearance.
2. Uncheck the Use Nerd Fonts (Icons) checkbox.
3. Tuim immediately replaces Nerd Font glyphs with standard Unicode and ASCII indicators (📁, 📄, *, +, -).
4. Eliminates missing glyph boxes or broken question-mark symbols.

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4. Terminal Color Capabilities

Tuim automatically queries your terminal environment (COLORTERM, TERM, TERM_PROGRAM):

• In Truecolor (24-bit direct color) terminals (Alacritty, Kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty, GNOME Terminal, Windows Terminal), Tuim renders full 16-million-color gradients and precise hex values.
• In 256-color or indexed environments, Tuim maps RGB colors down to the closest matching terminal palette cells.

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Next Steps

Learn how to write custom Lua configuration overrides for plugins in Custom Plugin Configuration.