Theming

strix ships several themes and lets you add your own. A theme controls both the UI chrome (borders, selection, status colours) and the diff colours, and selects a syntax-highlighting theme for code.

Choosing a theme

In ~/.config/strix/config.toml:

theme = "tokyo-night"

Or per-invocation:

strix --theme gruvbox

Or at runtime: press t to cycle to the next theme. The footer flashes the canonical name of the theme it switched to (e.g. tokyonight resolves and flashes as tokyo-night), and the choice is written back to config.toml — see Configuration. t cycles through the built-in presets first, in the order listed below, then your custom themes/*.toml files sorted alphabetically by file stem.

Built-in themes

Name	Description
tokyo-night	Dark, blue-accented (the default)
dark	Neutral dark
light	Neutral light
catppuccin	Catppuccin Mocha
gruvbox	Gruvbox dark

Custom themes

Drop a .toml file in ~/.config/strix/themes/ and reference it by file stem (my-theme.toml → theme = "my-theme"). Colours are hex strings:

base = "tokyo-night"            # preset to start from (default: tokyo-night)
syntax = "base16-ocean.dark"    # bundled syntect theme for code highlighting

[colors]
bg = "#1a1b26"
fg = "#a9b1d6"
dim = "#565f89"
border = "#292e42"
border_focused = "#7aa2f7"
staged = "#9ece6a"
unstaged = "#e0af68"
untracked = "#7dcfff"
selection_bg = "#283457"
add = "#9ece6a"
add_bg = "#202c26"
add_emph = "#2e5c3a"
add_gutter = "#1a241f"
del = "#f7768e"
del_bg = "#312027"
del_emph = "#642a3c"
del_gutter = "#281c21"
hunk = "#7dcfff"
comment = "#bb9af7"

comment colours the comment boxes (● you/● agent) and the file-list ● n badge — see Comments.

add_emph/del_emph are the side-by-side word-diff emphasis colours: on a genuinely modified pair (both sides present, similar enough to be an edit of one another), the changed span within the line is painted in add_emph (new side) / del_emph (old side) instead of the flat add_bg/del_bg wash — brighter and more saturated, so the edited substring reads distinctly. A pure addition/deletion, an unchanged context pair, or a pair too dissimilar to be a real edit gets no emphasis (just the base background). Both are optional in a custom theme file; an omitted one falls back to the base preset's value like every other colour.

add_gutter/del_gutter colour the empty column in side-by-side mode when its opposite has a pure addition or deletion (no partner line, so nothing to zip it against): the empty half of the row opposite an Addition gets add_gutter, opposite a Deletion gets del_gutter — a subtle tint instead of the flat pane background, so the row still reads as "one side changed" at a glance. A context pair (unchanged on both sides) and a modified pair (both sides present) never get this tint, on either side. Both are optional in a custom theme file; an omitted one falls back to the base preset's value like every other colour.

Any colour you omit falls back to the base preset's value, so a partial theme is fine.

Note

A custom theme file whose stem matches a built-in preset name or one of its aliases (e.g. themes/dark.toml, or themes/mocha.toml — mocha is an alias for catppuccin) is unreachable: the built-in preset always wins, both when resolving theme = "…" and when cycling with t. Pick a stem that isn't a preset name or alias.

Note

Themes use 24-bit colour. On a terminal without truecolor the palette degrades to the nearest 256-colour approximation.