Themes & Appearance

Choose your palette

Fresh installs use Ultra Dusk. Tide's built-in themes coordinate workbench surfaces, syntax highlighting, and terminal ANSI palettes.

Switch themes

Open the command palette with Ctrl+K while editing, or Ctrl+T / F1 from a terminal. Choose Select Color Theme. Ctrl+Alt+R opens it directly.

You can also open Settings and search for workbench.colorTheme, or edit ~/.config/tide/settings.jsonc under your configuration root:

{
  "workbench.colorTheme": "ultra-dusk"
}

Use the theme's ID from the table. Switching loaded themes updates the workbench and syntax highlighting without restarting.

Add a custom theme

Place a JSON or JSONC file under ~/.config/tide/themes/, or the themes directory under your XDG configuration root. The filename stem becomes the theme ID. Restart Tide after adding or editing a file, then choose it from Select Color Theme.

{
  "name": "My Theme",
  "type": "dark",
  "colors": {
    "editor.background": "#101218",
    "editor.foreground": "#e6e9f2",
    "editorCursor.foreground": "#c0abf5",
    "panel.border": "#565666",
    "focusBorder": "#c0abf5"
  },
  "tokenColors": [
    { "scope": ["comment"], "settings": { "foreground": "#89919d" } }
  ]
}

This is a starting point. Copy a complete built-in theme to retain the full workbench role inventory. Missing or invalid colors receive deterministic fallbacks; invalid files produce diagnostics and leave the built-in theme intact.

tokenColors uses TextMate scopes. Workbench roles, syntax colors, and terminal.ansi* entries serve different purposes. Explicit colors emitted by hosted terminal applications remain child-owned.

Workspace appearance

Your terminal application controls font family and size. Use a Nerd Font for file-type icons, or set tui.iconStyle to ascii.

{
  "tui.sidebar.location": "left",
  "tui.sidebar.width": 36,
  "tui.agentsSidebar.width": 36,
  "tui.terminal.height": 10,
  "editor.minimap.enabled": true
}

Coming soon: plugins, UX mods, and custom workspace experiences. Current settings already let you arrange panes, sidebars, and the dock.

Authoring and attribution

Read the full theme-authoring contract for supported roles and limits. Retain licenses and copyright when adapting themes. Built-in palette provenance is recorded in theme attribution.