Theming

A theme colors the whole app at once: the terminal, the chrome, the tabs, and the focus halo. ZenTerm starts in Rosé Pine Zen. Settings → Appearance lists the rest, including Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, Nord, Gruvbox, and Dracula.

Switch themes

Open Settings with , and choose Appearance, then pick a theme from the Theme menu. The change applies as you pick it, and the picker writes the choice to your config. Each theme is tagged Dark or Light, so you can match the one you want.

Pick a Light theme and the chrome turns with the terminal. The accent comes from the new palette, so the focus halo, the active tab, and the checkmark all follow it.

Pick the accent color

The chrome takes one color from your theme to mark what has focus and what is active. It paints the focused pane's glow and border, focus rings, the active tab's underline, a drawer or tool's activity dot while nothing there needs you, primary buttons, and the progress bar.

A dot leaves the accent when the drawer or tool float it belongs to wants something. It takes your theme's attention color while an agent there is waiting on you, and its positive color when a long command there finished unseen. Those are the same two colors a background tab's number takes.

Set it in Settings → Appearance → Accent color, which lists each hue with its swatch and hex. The names are the usual ANSI hues, so what you get is the color your theme put in that slot: on Rosé Pine Zen, magenta is iris. Switch themes and the accent follows the new palette. The terminal is untouched, so a program printing in that color looks the same as it did.

The accent-color option lists the names it takes, including the bright variant of each.

Let the desktop through

A theme sets the colors. How solid the terminal sits over your desktop is a separate value: Background alpha, in Settings → Terminal. 1 is solid, and 0 puts your text over the window blur with your desktop behind it. It applies as you type it.

The padding around a terminal follows the same value, in a pane and in a tool float, so each still reads as one surface. A translucent float frosts the panes it covers, the way a translucent pane frosts your desktop. Cards and notices keep their own solid background, so Settings, the palette, and a notice stay readable over whatever is behind them.

That is the terminal. To dial the window shell instead, use backdrop-alpha, which sets the tint over the behind-window blur. The two are independent, and background-alpha has the range and the default.

Bring your own theme

ZenTerm reads Ghostty theme files, so any Ghostty theme works unchanged. Drop a file into ~/.config/zen-term/themes/ and name it in your config:

theme = my-theme

A name resolves your themes/<name> file first, then the bundled catalog, so your own file wins when the names match. See an example theme file for the format, and the theme option for how it resolves.

Let Neovim follow

Switching theme in Settings can recolor your editor at the same time. ZenTerm publishes the theme it resolved, and zen-theme.nvim applies a matching colorscheme while Neovim is running. Bundled themes name the colorscheme they want, and your own theme file names one with a single nvim-colorscheme line. The Neovim guide has the setup.