Themes & appearance

/theme switches live. With no argument it shows a swatch of every palette, so you pick by eye rather than by name.

Eleven palettes, switched live100×30 · 0:15

The block fills, the context gauge and the mode chip re-tint together, because they are drawn from the palette rather than hard-coded.

The palettes

Name	Character
neon	Electric cyan-green, hot magenta and lime on deep indigo. The default.
dark	A quieter dark palette for a long session.
ansi	Your terminal’s own sixteen colours. Drops the fills for a rule.
catppuccin-mocha	Soft pastels on warm dark.
tokyo-night	Cool blues and purples.
gruvbox-dark	Retro warm earth tones.
nord	Muted arctic blues.
dracula	High-contrast purple and pink.
rose-pine	Low-saturation rose and pine.
solarized-light	The only light palette.
mono	No colour at all — hierarchy from bold and dim.

theme = "auto" (the default) resolves to neon. That is a deliberate choice rather than a fallback: the block fills that give the transcript its shape need colours koda can predict, and a palette derived from your terminal’s sixteen cannot supply them.

Why fills instead of boxes

Blocks are grouped by a tinted background, not a border: warm behind your messages, cool behind tool output, red behind failures.

A fill costs no rows. A box costs two, plus a perimeter walk per block, on every redraw — and in a transcript that is thousands of blocks long, that is the difference between a frame you notice and one you do not. The tint also carries information a border cannot: the block’s kind is legible before you have read a word of it.

ansi and mono cannot rely on a predictable background, so they drop the fills and use a rule instead. The hierarchy survives; only the mechanism changes.

What else is coloured

Structured output — /help, /models, /theme, /skills, /tools — renders as filled blocks with a bold amber heading: title on the left, hint on the right, sized to your terminal, long rows clipped.

The bottom bar is chevron-separated segments, each in its own colour: model, project, branch, endpoint, then tokens and a context gauge drawn to eighth-block precision. Above the input sits the mode chip, what the agent is doing, step progress, and only the keys that apply right now.

The plan gets a standing block with a progress gauge. Done steps are struck through; the step in flight is the only bold row.

Degrading gracefully

Condition	What happens
NO_COLOR=1 or TERM=dumb	Forces mono. Hierarchy comes from bold and dim alone.
icons = "ascii"	Replaces box drawing and braille for terminals that cannot render them.
Terminal narrower than 92 columns	The layout drops to a denser arrangement.
Narrower than 64 columns	It drops again, to the essentials.

Motion

Setting	Command	What it governs
motion	/motion	All animation: spinners, gauges, progressive reveal.
reveal	/reveal	Only the progressive typing-in of streaming text. Requires motion.
sync_output	—	Wraps each frame in DEC 2026 synchronized-update markers, so a frame arrives whole rather than torn.

Turning motion off leaves a fully static UI that reads exactly the same. Nothing in koda’s design depends on something moving.