Lacold

Lacold is a restrained, generated theme family for editors, terminals, and developer tools. Its visual grammar absorbs the former local iA editor themes: neutral colors carry text and interface hierarchy, the selected chromatic family carries structure, and a small fixed semantic palette is reserved for feedback.

The first collection is Air. It has five hand-authored foreground families — Blue, Green, Orange, Pink, and Purple — with independent Light and Dark palettes. That produces ten official variants:

Lacold Air Blue Light       Lacold Air Blue Dark
Lacold Air Green Light      Lacold Air Green Dark
Lacold Air Orange Light     Lacold Air Orange Dark
Lacold Air Pink Light       Lacold Air Pink Dark
Lacold Air Purple Light     Lacold Air Purple Dark

Design contract

Lacold is ink-first, not monochrome. Normal syntax and interface hierarchy stay neutral; keywords, navigation, and selection use the chosen accent. Conventional red, orange, yellow, green, purple, and cyan appear only when semantics benefit from them: diagnostics, diffs, search, terminal ANSI colors, and shell state.

Air's neutral structure is based on that iA palette. Each accent defines strong, primary, secondary, faint, wash, selection, inactive_selection, and bracket values separately for Light and Dark. A separate Light/Dark semantic palette supplies status, wash, and terminal roles; the cursor follows each variant's authored primary accent. No color-generation algorithm changes authored palette values.

Generate themes

Lacold uses Ruby 3.2 or newer and has no runtime gem dependencies.

bin/lacold list
bin/lacold build
bin/lacold build --target vim,kitty --color pink --mode dark
bin/lacold check
bin/lacold site

The default build writes to dist/. Generated files are release artifacts and are not committed to the repository. Use --output to select another directory.

Available adapters in v0.1:

• CotEditor
• Terminal.app
• iTerm2
• Vim and NeoVim
• Emacs
• Visual Studio
• Visual Studio Code
• IntelliJ Platform
• Kitty
• Fish
• bat
• fzf
• Codex CLI
• OpenCode
• Nano
• DrRacket
• Zed
• Tmux
• Zellij
• Agy (Antigravity CLI, inheriting terminal colors)
• BTop
• Xcode
• Gedit
• Kate
• GNOME Terminal
• Windows Terminal
• Konsole

Development

bundle install
bundle exec rake check
bundle exec rake build
bundle exec rake site

rake check validates the palette matrix, contrast requirements, parsable output, manifest completeness, and deterministic generation. The static demo is built into _site/ and deployed through GitHub Pages.

Releases are built from version tags. Each target receives a compressed archive, the VS Code target also receives a VSIX, and SHA256SUMS covers every published asset.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.