ZenTerm 1.1.0
This release is about themes: forty-eight more of them, a chrome that holds its contrast in every one, and Neovim recoloring alongside the terminal.
New
Forty-eight more themes. Settings → Appearance lists 65 now, up from 17, and 20 of them are light where three were before. Monokai Pro's seven, the six Nightfox siblings, five GitHub themes, Flexoki, Gruvbox Material, Iceberg, Jellybeans, Kanso, Melange, Moonfly, Oxocarbon, Vesper, Kanagawa Dragon and Lotus, and the Bones family. Each palette is copied from its source, and Acknowledgements credits every project it came from.
Neovim recolors with the terminal. ZenTerm writes the active theme to ~/Library/Application Support/ZenTerm/theme.json at launch and on every theme change. Install zen-theme.nvim and switching theme in Settings switches your editor's colorscheme to match, live. Bundled themes name their Neovim colorscheme already; your own theme files join in with one nvim-colorscheme line, which is documented in the theme file itself. It changes no color, so a theme file carrying it is still a valid ghostty theme.
Type to filter any dropdown. Every dropdown in Settings is a combo box now: the list is sorted, and typing narrows it instead of jumping to the first letter. Picking a theme out of 65 is the case it was built for.
Changed
The default accent is blue. It was magenta, which came from the hand-picked iris in Rosé Pine Zen; blue is the slot most themes treat as their primary. The accent paints focus rings, the active tab's underline, primary buttons, and the focused pane's glow. If you set accent-color yourself, nothing moves. To keep magenta, put accent-color = magenta in ~/.config/zen-term/config.
The chrome holds its contrast on every theme. Text and icons ran on twenty-one hand-tuned transparencies that were picked against one dark theme, so a caption that receded there could go unreadable on a light theme and a divider could vanish. They resolve from four weights now, lifted on light themes where dark ink reads fainter, and fills are scaled per theme so a border is equally visible in all of them. In practice: inactive tab titles and footer icons are legible where a translucent shell used to lose them, disabled labels sit below the text next to them, and a keycap reads as a control rather than a caption.
backdrop-alpha says what it costs. Below 1 you are looking at your desktop through the shell, and the chrome on top of it reads against your wallpaper. The reference config now says so where you set it.
Fixed
A notice wore the accent instead of its own color. The badge on a warning or an error painted from the chrome accent rather than the notice's own tone, so all four kinds looked alike. Each takes its own again.
A notice open across a theme change kept the old theme. Its icon recolored while Dismiss and Switch stayed in the previous theme's accent.
A focused button gave no feedback but the ring. Three of six button kinds could show accent text and the rest showed none, so tabbing to one was easy to miss. Focus tints the label now, except on a destructive button, which keeps its warning color.
A dropdown left open through a theme change stayed in the old theme. ⌘⇧, reloads your config, which left a dark list hanging under a light Settings card until you typed.
Closing a dropdown could take the keyboard with it. Clicking an open list reopened it, tabbing away dropped focus until you clicked, and resizing the window left the button as a search box holding a query typing could not change.
Install
ZenTerm updates itself. On v0.2.0 or later, the update card appears in the app. For a first install, open the DMG and drag ZenTerm to Applications. macOS 14 or later, Apple Silicon.
Reporting a bug
From inside the app: Help → Report an Issue prefills the version and your environment. You can still open an issue directly.