toowl

Documentation

Themes

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

toowl ships sixteen themes — all originals — and starts dark by default (toowl_ink). 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 Ink Dark
theme = "toowl_ink"
~/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 Ember Dark
theme = "toowl_ember"
~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev
Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36
ready in 78ms toowl.dev
selected text
Toowl Abyss Dark
theme = "toowl_abyss"
~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev
Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36
ready in 78ms toowl.dev
selected text
Toowl Velvet Dark
theme = "toowl_velvet"
~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev
Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36
ready in 78ms toowl.dev
selected text
Toowl Moss Dark
theme = "toowl_moss"
~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev
Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36
ready in 78ms toowl.dev
selected text
Toowl Nocturne Dark
theme = "toowl_nocturne"
~/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 Linen Light
theme = "toowl_linen"
~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev
Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36
ready in 78ms toowl.dev
selected text
Toowl Noon Light
theme = "toowl_noon"
~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev
Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36
ready in 78ms toowl.dev
selected text
Toowl Mist Light
theme = "toowl_mist"
~/toowl git:(main) $ toowl up dev
Compiling toowl-app v1.0.36
ready in 78ms toowl.dev
selected text
Toowl Parchment Light
theme = "toowl_parchment"
~/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 set do not resolve: toowl logs a warning and falls back to toowl_ink rather than silently substituting a theme you didn't pick.

Light themes

Six are light. toowl_linen is the flagship — Ink's palette at daylight polarity — and toowl_noon is a literal white (#ffffff) ground for projectors and screen sharing, where any tint reads as a smudge. toowl_mist is a softer cool grey for bright rooms without the glare, and toowl_parchment, toowl_dawn and toowl_snowy round out the warm and cool ends. 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.