Themes

gori ships thirty built-in colour themes: goridark (the default), goriday, latte, espresso, tokyonight, gruvbox, nord, dracula, solarized_light, rosepine_dawn, catppuccin_mocha, monokai, everforest, onedark, kanagawa, github_dark, zenburn, synthwave84, cyberpunk, matrix, cobalt2, high_contrast, github_light, gruvbox_light, one_light, ayu_light, rosepine, tokyonight_day, dancheong, and hanji.

Switching Themes

Open Preferences with Ctrl-, (or the ⚙ chip in the top bar), go to Appearance, and press ↵ on the Theme row. The row previews the current theme inline: its name and a small swatch of its palette. Ctrl-P → settings:theme opens the same picker in one step.

The picker is a vertical, scrollable list; each row shows a small swatch of the theme's own palette, and selecting a row previews it live. Enter applies and persists the choice, Esc reverts.

Ctrl-, works in the project picker too, so you can set your theme on first launch before opening a project. Theme is the only section editable there; the rest need a project open.

The same History view across six of the built-ins:

gori History tab in the goridark theme: near-black canvas with a subtle gold focus outline — goridark (default)

gori History tab in the goriday light theme: warm off-white canvas with dark text — goriday (light)

gori History tab in the tokyonight theme: deep blue canvas with cool accent colours — tokyonight

gori History tab in the gruvbox theme: warm dark canvas with retro amber and green accents — gruvbox

gori History tab in the dancheong theme: green-black lacquer canvas carrying the vivid obangsaek pigments of a painted temple beam, with a gilt focus outline — dancheong

gori History tab in the hanji light theme: warm ivory mulberry-paper canvas written in ink, with an indigo focus outline — hanji (light)

Custom Themes

You can add your own themes as JSON files, dropped into:

~/.gori/themes/<name>.json

(~/.gori is the gori home directory; override it with $GORI_HOME.) The file name is the theme name. ocean.json becomes the theme ocean. Custom themes appear in the picker after the built-ins, in file-name order. gori loads them at startup and again each time you open the theme picker, so you can drop a file in and reopen it without restarting.

Format

A theme is a JSON object mapping palette fields to #rrggbb hex colours. Use the optional "base" key to inherit every colour you don't override from a built-in theme, so a theme can be as small as one accent tweak:

{
  "base": "goridark",
  "accent": "#ff33cc",
  "syn_header": "#33ccff"
}

Without "base", the default (goridark) supplies any omitted colour.

A Full Theme

Every field, all inheriting from base when omitted:

{
  "base": "goridark",

  "bg":            "#0a0a0b",
  "panel":         "#141417",
  "elevated":      "#1b1b1f",
  "border":        "#2a2a30",
  "border_focus":  "#3a3a42",
  "focus_gold":    "#d9c28b",
  "accent":        "#fafafa",
  "accent_bg":     "#26262c",
  "selection_dim": "#19191c",
  "text":          "#c8c8cc",
  "text_bright":   "#fafafa",
  "muted":         "#6e6e76",
  "green":         "#52c77a",
  "yellow":        "#d6a13a",
  "red":           "#e5534b",
  "orange":        "#d9813f",
  "syn_header":    "#82a8c4",
  "syn_string":    "#8fb87a",
  "syn_number":    "#ca9b6a",
  "syn_literal":   "#b08ec2",
  "syn_comment":   "#6f8172",
  "syn_keyword":   "#d08c9a"
}

Field	Used For
`bg`	The canvas (main background)
`panel`	Top bar, status bar, overlays
`elevated`	Header bands, active segments
`border`	Resting hairline dividers
`border_focus`	The outline of an active modal card
`focus_gold`	The focused body pane's outline
`accent`	The highlight colour (selection marker, emphasis)
`accent_bg`	The selection band in the focused pane
`selection_dim`	The selection band in an unfocused pane
`text`	Body text
`text_bright`	Emphasised / active text
`muted`	Secondary / dimmed text
`green`	2xx status
`yellow`	4xx status
`red`	5xx status / errors
`orange`	Accent for warnings
`syn_header`	Header/field names, JSON keys, tag names
`syn_string`	Quoted strings
`syn_number`	Numbers, tag attribute names
`syn_literal`	`true` / `false` / `null`
`syn_comment`	Comments (GraphQL `#`, JSONC `//`, HTML `<!-- -->`)
`syn_keyword`	Language keywords, auth schemes

Notes

"base" must name a built-in theme. A custom theme can't be the base of another, and an unknown base falls back to goridark.
The file name is normalised to lower-case a-z 0-9 - _; other characters are dropped (My Theme!.json → mytheme).
A file whose name collides with a built-in (e.g. goridark.json) is ignored. The built-ins can't be redefined.
Loading is tolerant: an unreadable file, invalid JSON, or a non-object is skipped, and a single malformed colour falls back to the base value rather than discarding the whole theme. A broken theme file never crashes the TUI.
For readability, keep your functional colours (text, status, syntax) well-contrasted against bg; the built-ins target WCAG AA (≥ 4.5:1).

Next Steps

Hotkeys: rebind gori's keyboard shortcuts the same way
Settings: the Preferences modal and every section in it
Configuration: where settings.json lives and what else it holds