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).
Dracula+	Higher-contrast Dracula variant with cursor-text set.
Dracula	The original Dracula palette.
Catppuccin Mocha	Pastel dark; the "mocha" Catppuccin flavor.
Gruvbox Dark Hard	Warm, high-contrast retro palette.
TokyoNight	Cool blues + softer accent colors.
Atom One Dark	Atom editor's familiar dark scheme.

The six themes other than roost-dark are byte-identical copies of files 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.

File format

Theme files are plain key=value text with # comments — the same syntax as config.conf (and as Ghostty's themes). Roost honors:

Key	Required	Effect
background	yes	Default background color. Parser errors if missing.
foreground	yes	Default foreground color. Parser errors if missing.
palette = N=#RRGGBB	no	One of the 16 ANSI colors (N in 0..15). Unset entries default to black. Indices 16–255 are computed (xterm 6×6×6 cube + 24-step gray ramp).
cursor-color	no	Cursor block fill. Defaults to foreground.
cursor-text	no	Glyph color when the cursor sits over a non-empty cell. Defaults to background.
bold-color	no	Color for bold text drawn with the default foreground. Bold-with-explicit-color (e.g. bold red) is unaffected. Defaults to foreground.
selection-background	no	Selection overlay color (rendered at 35% alpha). Defaults to foreground.
selection-foreground	no	Parsed but currently unused (see Limitations). Defaults to background.

Unknown keys are 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, drop the file into cmd/roost/themes/ and rebuild — the directory is 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 usually copy a file in:

# Run from your roost checkout.
cp "/Applications/Ghostty.app/Contents/Resources/ghostty/themes/Solarized Dark - Patched" \
   ./cmd/roost/themes/
./build/build.sh

Then set theme = Solarized Dark - Patched in config.conf. If the theme uses keys roost doesn't honor (e.g. palette-generate), they're silently dropped — the rest still works.