Documentation

Themes

Six palette-true flagship themes, live-reloaded from config.toml, plus how to write your own.

toowl ships six flagship themes — all originals — and starts dark by default (toowl_sepia). Every swatch below is rendered from the actual palette in toowl-theme — these are the real colors, not screenshots. Set one in ~/.config/toowl/config.toml and it applies the instant you save (no restart — the config watcher hot-reloads in about 150 ms).

[appearance]
theme = "toowl_moonlight"

The gallery

Each card shows a tiny terminal painted with that theme's background, foreground, cursor, selection, and ANSI colors. The mono name under each is exactly what you write after theme =.

~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev

Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36

ready in 78ms toowl.dev

selected text

Toowl Sepia Dark

theme = "toowl_sepia"

~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev

Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36

ready in 78ms toowl.dev

selected text

Toowl Dusk Dark

theme = "toowl_dusk"

~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev

Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36

ready in 78ms toowl.dev

selected text

Toowl Moonlight Dark

theme = "toowl_moonlight"

~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev

Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36

ready in 78ms toowl.dev

selected text

Toowl Aurora Dark

theme = "toowl_aurora"

~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev

Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36

ready in 78ms toowl.dev

selected text

Toowl Dawn Light

theme = "toowl_dawn"

~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev

Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36

ready in 78ms toowl.dev

selected text

Toowl Snowy Light

theme = "toowl_snowy"

Switching themes

Edit the file — change theme in [appearance] and save; the live window restyles immediately.
Command palette — Cmd+Shift+P (macOS) / Ctrl+Shift+P and search the theme name.
Settings — Cmd+, / Ctrl+, opens the visual settings panel.

Name matching is forgiving. by_name ignores case and separators and accepts the short form — moonlight, toowl_moonlight, and Toowl-Moonlight all resolve to the same theme. Names outside the six do not resolve: toowl logs a warning and falls back to toowl_sepia rather than silently substituting a theme you didn't pick.

Light themes

Two of the six are light — toowl_dawn (warm cream) and toowl_snowy (cool paper white). toowl's window chrome and overlays tint to the active theme, so a light theme reads cleanly in daylight while the dark ones stay easy at night.

Bring your own

A theme is just a foreground, background, cursor, selection, link color, and 16 ANSI colors. The built-ins live as pub static values in crates/toowl-theme/src/lib.rs; copy one, change the hex values, and register it. Pro builds can also register extra themes at startup via register_extra_theme without forking. Full per-field reference is on the Configuration page.