Themes and Visualization
QBZ ships with 36 built-in themes, plus an auto-theme generator and a full custom-theme editor. Every theme is fully materialized in the native Slint app — recent work focused not only on adding styles, but on contrast, foreground/background pairing, and accessibility across the whole app. The default theme on a fresh profile is OLED Black.
Switch themes in Settings > Appearance > Theme. The theme picker is a searchable dropdown — start typing to narrow the list, and it swaps its icon to reflect the active theme. Themes are grouped into Core, Dark, Light, and Accessibility.
| Family | Themes |
|---|---|
| Core | Dark, OLED Black (default), Light, System |
| Dark | Warm, Nord, Dracula, Tokyo Night, Catppuccin Mocha, Catppuccin Frappé, Catppuccin Macchiato, Breeze Dark, Adwaita Dark, Aurora, Ikari, Ayanami, Iscariot, Stratego, Rumi, Zoey, Mira, Frost, Langley |
| Light | Catppuccin Latte, Alucard, Rose Pine Dawn, Breeze Light, Adwaita Light, Duotone Snow, Snow Storm, Kurosaki |
| Accessibility | WCAG Light, WCAG Dark, High Contrast, High Contrast Light, Colorblind |
Catppuccin now ships all four flavors — Mocha, Frappé and Macchiato (dark) and Latte (light) — thanks to @TerminalTilt. Frost and Langley read as light in some older listings but are visually dark canvases, so they live under Dark.
The WCAG and High Contrast themes are built around accessible, high-contrast color relationships. Many stylistic themes also received contrast tuning so accent colors stay readable as text, icons, buttons, badges, and progress fills. On light themes the track-row play glyph and the circular action buttons were made legible against pale surfaces.
Selecting the Auto (dynamic) theme exposes Source controls in Settings > Appearance. QBZ generates a color theme on the fly from:
- System Colors — uses colors exposed by your desktop environment
- Wallpaper Sync — extracts colors from your current wallpaper when supported
- Custom Image — generate a theme from any image you choose
Hit Regenerate to rebuild the theme at any time. QBZ shows the detected desktop environment and notes that the result is experimental and may not match your system exactly. Wallpaper detection depends on the desktop environment and its portal support; if it fails, pick another theme or generate from a custom image.
Selecting the Custom theme opens an inline editor in Settings > Appearance. You can:
- Use current colors — seed the editor from whatever theme is applied now
- Toggle Dark theme to flip the overall light/dark polarity (this drives derived shades, borders and overlays)
- Edit each base token in a grouped swatch grid (Surfaces, Text, Accent, and more) — the rest of the palette is derived live in Rust on every change
QBZ can paint an app-wide dynamic background drawn from the current album art, blooming behind the entire shell and reading through the content area — a "modo Cider"-style backdrop. Pick it in Settings > Appearance:
| Mode | Look |
|---|---|
| Off | No backdrop (default) |
| Ambient | A metaball ambient shader tinted from the artwork, with translucent bars, panels and glass carousels over it |
| Blurred art | The cover art itself, blurred, behind the shell |
This effect is GPU-only — it needs the wgpu renderer tier, so the picker row
is disabled on the OpenGL/Software tiers. It puts an idle GPU to work; on a hybrid
laptop you can move that load to the discrete adapter via Preferred GPU (see
Composition). In immersive mode the ambient scene gets livelier.
The immersive player is a full-screen experience with album artwork and real-time audio visualizations.
- Click the album artwork or track title in the Now Playing bar
- Press F to toggle fullscreen
The immersive player has 20+ visualization panels. Swipe or use arrow keys to switch between them:
| Panel | Description |
|---|---|
| Static | Album artwork with track info |
| Visualizer | Classic spectrum analyzer |
| Oscilloscope | Real-time waveform display |
| Linebed | 3D frequency landscape |
| Coverflow | Album artwork carousel |
| Vinyl | Animated spinning vinyl record |
| Lyrics | Full synchronized lyrics display |
| Lyrics Focus | Minimal lyrics with blurred background |
| Album Reactive | Artwork that reacts to audio |
| CometFlow | Particle-based frequency visualization |
| Energy Bands | Frequency band energy meter |
| Lissajous | Stereo phase correlation display |
| Neon Flow | Flowing neon light visualization |
| Spectral Ribbon | Frequency spectrum ribbon |
| Transient Pulse | Pulse-based beat visualization |
| Tunnel Flow | 3D tunnel reactive to audio |
| Queue | Current queue with artwork |
| Suggestions | Suggested next tracks |
| History | Recently played tracks |
| Track Info | Detailed track metadata and credits |
QBZ displays synchronized lyrics when available:
- Time-synced lyrics scroll with the music
- Click any lyric line to seek to that position
- Available in both dedicated Lyrics panels and as an overlay
All keyboard shortcuts are fully customizable:
- Go to Settings > Customize Shortcuts
- Click any shortcut to rebind it
- Press the new key combination
- Save your changes