Themes

Roost ships with a small set of bundled color themes. Pick one with theme = NAME in config.conf. Themes control colors only; font choice stays on font_family / font_size.

# ~/.config/roost/config.conf
theme = Dracula+

The setting takes effect on the next launch (themes are not hot-reloaded today). Unknown names fall back to roost-dark with a warning logged at startup.

Bundled themes

Name	Style
roost-dark	The default. Roost's built-in dark palette (cmux-derived).
0x96f	Muted dark with vivid accents.
Atom	The classic Atom editor palette.
Atom One Dark	Atom editor's familiar dark scheme.
Ayu Mirage	Ayu's muted mid-dark variant.
Catppuccin Frappe	Catppuccin's softer mid-dark flavor.
Catppuccin Macchiato	Catppuccin's deeper mid-dark flavor.
Catppuccin Mocha	Pastel dark; the darkest Catppuccin flavor.
Dracula	The original Dracula palette.
Dracula+	Higher-contrast Dracula variant.
Everforest Dark Hard	Warm, low-saturation forest greens.
GitHub Dark Default	GitHub's current dark UI palette.
Gruvbox Dark	Warm retro palette, medium contrast.
Gruvbox Dark Hard	Warm, high-contrast retro palette.
Kanagawa Wave	Muted indigo/teal inspired by Hokusai.
Material Ocean	Very dark blue-black with soft Material accents.
Monokai Pro	Warm grey base; vibrant pink/green/yellow/purple.
Monokai Remastered	Near-black Monokai; high-contrast saturated accents.
Nord	Cool, desaturated arctic blues.
One Half Dark	The One Half dark scheme.
Oxocarbon	IBM Carbon dark; cool cyan/blue/magenta accents.
Rose Pine	Soft rosy mauves on deep base.
Solarized Dark Patched	Solarized Dark with the common ANSI patch.
Synthwave	Pure-black base with neon retro accents.
TokyoNight	Cool blues + softer accent colors.
TokyoNight Storm	TokyoNight on a slightly lighter base.

Every theme other than roost-dark is a byte-identical copy of a file from Ghostty's bundled set. If you want a Ghostty theme that's not on this list, it usually parses cleanly in roost — see File format below. The bundled set is dark-only by design; light-background Ghostty themes still load if you add one, but they render a light terminal area inside Roost's dark window chrome.

File format

Theme files are plain key=value text with # comments — the same syntax as config.conf (and as Ghostty's themes). Roost starts from the built-in roost-dark palette and overlays whatever keys a file sets; any key a file omits keeps its roost-dark value. Nothing is required — a file with only palette lines is valid. Roost honors:

Key	Effect
background	Default background color.
foreground	Default foreground color.
palette = N=#RRGGBB	One of the 16 ANSI colors (N in 0..15). Indices 16–255 are computed (xterm 6×6×6 cube + 24-step gray ramp).
cursor-color	Cursor block fill.
bold-color	Color for bold text drawn with the default foreground. Bold-with-explicit-color (e.g. bold red) is unaffected.
selection-background	Selection overlay color (rendered at 35% alpha).
selection-foreground	Parsed but currently unused (see Limitations).

Any other key — including Ghostty's cursor-text, link-color, and palette-generate — is silently ignored. A theme file is typically ~22 lines.

Example (the bundled Dracula+):

palette = 0=#21222c
palette = 1=#ff5555
palette = 2=#50fa7b
# ... palette = 3..14 ...
palette = 15=#f8f8f2
background = #212121
foreground = #f8f8f2
cursor-color = #eceff4
cursor-text = #282828
selection-background = #f8f8f2
selection-foreground = #545454

Limitations

• No user override directory. Only the bundled themes are loadable. To use a theme that isn't bundled, add the file to the bundled set and rebuild (see below) — themes are embedded into the binary at compile time.
• No hot-reload. Theme is loaded once when each tab is created. To switch, edit config.conf and restart roost.
• selection-foreground is parsed but not yet rendered. Roost's selection is currently a 35%-alpha overlay over the existing text; honoring selection-foreground requires switching to opaque selection + re-rendering glyphs, which is a render-order change tracked separately.
• Indices 16–255 of the palette are not customizable — they're filled by the standard xterm formula. Bundled themes only set indices 0–15, matching every Ghostty theme.

Trying a Ghostty theme that isn't bundled

The format is identical, so you can add one to the bundled set. Themes live in two byte-identical trees — the Rust crate (Linux UI) and the Mac SwiftPM bundle — kept in sync by make themes-check:

# Run from your roost checkout. Copy into BOTH trees.
SRC="/Applications/Ghostty.app/Contents/Resources/ghostty/themes/Solarized Osaka Night"
cp "$SRC" crates/roost-linux/src/resources/themes/
cp "$SRC" mac/Sources/Roost/Resources/themes/

The Mac UI discovers themes by listing its bundle directory, so it picks the new file up automatically. The Linux UI embeds them explicitly: add a matching entry to the BUNDLED_THEMES array in crates/roost-linux/src/theme.rs. Then rebuild (cargo build / swift build) and set theme = Solarized Osaka Night in config.conf. If the theme uses keys roost doesn't honor (e.g. palette-generate), they're silently dropped — the rest still works.