Desktop

Desktop applications

The userscript themes the web. desktop/ themes the programs around it, from the same palettes, so the browser and the apps stop disagreeing about what dark golden means.

One rule behind every decision: applications update themselves, and an update must not quietly break anything. Where a target has a place in your own profile, the theme goes there and survives updates. Where it does not, the installer is written to be re-run — and says so, rather than pretending it persisted.

The GUI

Double-click Wintage Installer.vbs in the repo root to open it without a console window, or run directly for diagnostics:

powershell -File desktop\WintageInstaller.ps1

Theme list with colour chips, the targets found on this machine, a live Win95 preview, and all twenty-one colour tokens as editable swatches. Editing any swatch forks the palette into Custom. A live WCAG panel shows contrast for the three text-bearing tokens before Apply.

Targets are split into two keyboard-reachable lists: MY APPS (portable/source-tree CodeNomad, SAIPENVIEW, SmartVac, WildRift) and POPULAR APPS (Windows, OBS, terminals, editors and other installed software). ALL/NONE and Apply/Revert operate across both lists without changing their grouping.

What each target can actually be themed

target	mechanism	survives an app update
windows	user .theme: dark system/app mode, accent and classic colour roles	yes
browsers	detects Chromium profiles, stages the chrome theme, opens browser-owned confirmation pages	yes after one Load unpacked per profile
terminal	Windows Terminal scheme + all-profile defaults, Consolas 12 aliased	yes
conhost	HKCU\Console defaults + every existing cmd/PowerShell profile	yes
obs	OBS 30.2+ .ovt variant + active user.ini theme ID	yes
antigravity, vscode	colour-theme extension in the extensions folder	yes
freebuff, antigravity-app, codenomad	Electron shim (relocation)	no — re-run the installer
claude	Electron shim, patched in place	no — an update makes a new folder
mpchc	registry, dark theme + OSD typography only	no — MPC-HC rewrites settings on exit
obsidian	community theme per vault, all palettes installed at once	yes
saipenview	rewrites its own :root token values in style.css	no — a source file; re-run after a pull
discord	CSS dropped into BetterDiscord's own theme folder	yes
totalcmd, totalcmd2	wincmd.ini [Colors] keys	yes
smartvac, wildrift	token table rewritten in the app's own source	no — a source file; re-run after a pull

Electron apps

resources/app.asar is moved to resources/app/app.asar (its app.asar.unpacked sibling moves with it — that pairing is by filename), and a small shim.cjs takes the vacated resources/app slot. The shim injects the stylesheet and then loads the original archive. No application byte is rewritten, only relocated; -Revert moves it straight back.

The stylesheet is not written for these apps — it is extracted from wintage.user.js, so every bevel, scrollbar and type-ladder fix made for the browser lands here too.

Claude's desktop app: in-place

Claude cannot use relocation, because OnlyLoadAppFromAsar is fused on. It is patched in place: the archive is backed up, its package.json main is rewritten to the shim (padded to the same byte length, so every offset stays valid), and the per-file integrity hash is updated to match. -Revert restores the backup.

Claude's BrowserWindow renders a thin shell and the entire visible application is a WebContentsView — the shim hooks web-contents-created, which covers window contents, WebContentsViews, BrowserViews, <webview> guests and popups alike.

Terminals

terminal writes a Wintage colour scheme into every detected Windows Terminal settings file and selects it through profiles.defaults, with console-safe Consolas 12. conhost covers classic cmd.exe, Windows PowerShell, Git CMD/Bash profiles and other HKCU\Console children, writing the palette's full 16-colour table and restoring only the values it touched. Proportional Verdana collides inside the fixed-width cell grid, so both hosts use Consolas.

Rebuilding

Everything under desktop/out/ is generated from themes/*.json. It is not tracked in git, so a fresh clone must build it once before installing:

node ..\tools\build-desktop.js          # rebuild all targets
node ..\tools\build-desktop.js --check  # exit 1 if anything is stale

release.ps1 runs the build and every gate, so a release cannot ship output that has drifted from the palettes.