Themes

Pick the colors of the interface and the code blocks, make a theme of your own, or adjust a few colors on top of any theme. The footer line you can fill from your own script has moved to Status line.

Choose a theme

Run /theme. As you move through the list, the whole screen switches to that theme so you can judge it in place. Enter keeps it and saves it to your user settings; Esc puts back the theme you had when the picker opened. The same picker appears once during first-run setup.

auto decides at start-up by asking the terminal for its background color, and falls back to the COLORFGBG variable some terminals set. If neither answers, it uses the dark theme.

Older theme names from earlier versions (such as system or solarized) are still accepted in settings files so they do not cause errors, but they display as one of the themes above.

Other ways to set it

Code block colors

Code blocks use a highlighting scheme that matches the theme. To pick a different one, set syntaxTheme in your user settings or SYNTIC_SYNTAX_THEME in the environment. The built-in themes pair with these schemes:

{ "theme": "dark", "syntaxTheme": "base16-ocean.dark" }

An organization policy can also set syntaxTheme; it then wins over your own choice.

Make your own theme

/theme create harbour light

This writes a starter file at ~/.syntic/themes/harbour.json and opens it in your editor. The second word is the base (dark or light); leave it out for dark.

{
  "name": "Harbour",
  "base": "light",
  "colors": {
    "accent": "#0b6bcb",
    "success": "#1a7f37",
    "warning": "#9a6700",
    "error": "#cf222e",
    "link": "#0969da"
  }
}

A color can be #rrggbb, the short #rgb, a color name such as blue or lightgreen, or a 256-color number.

Custom themes appear in /theme after the built-in ones, sorted by name. To use one without the picker, put its name in settings: "theme": "Harbour". If two files use the same name, the first one (by file name) wins and the other is reported.

Adjust a few colors with themeColors

To change just a handful of colors on top of whichever theme is active (built-in or custom), use themeColors in your settings:

{
  "themeColors": {
    "accent": "#7c3aed",
    "diffAdd": "#2da44e",
    "diffDel": "red",
    "border": 75
  }
}

Values are #rrggbb, a terminal color number from 0 to 255, or a color name. Key names are not case sensitive. Unknown keys and unreadable values are skipped quietly.

A color for this session

/color <name> gives the current session’s prompt box its own color, so you can tell side-by-side sessions apart. The choices are red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple and pink. /color default goes back to the theme’s color.

No color at all

Set NO_COLOR (any value) or run syntic --no-color to draw everything in your terminal’s default colors. Bold, dim, underline and reverse video still work, and the selected row in lists is shown in reverse video so it stays visible. --no-color wins over FORCE_COLOR.

More footer and look settings

All of these can also be changed in /config.

The view itself (inline or full screen) is covered on Full-screen mode, and every key is listed in the settings reference.