slosh.git/contrib/themes, branch master

theme: a name and a directory, not sixty colours in your config

2026-09-22T10:42:15Z

Wearing a theme meant pasting its `theme { }` block into config.kdl, or including a path to a file you had copied there yourself. Both make the palette a literal in your config, and a literal is the one thing you cannot change cheaply: not from a script, not from a running session, not by a list of what is available, and never again from upstream -- the colours you pasted are the colours that theme had the day you pasted them. So a theme is a file in a directory now, and a config names it: theme_name "phosphor" theme { frame_focus "#00ff88" } // ...but that one colour is mine theme_name is applied after the includes and before everything the file says itself, which is the rule includes already follow and for the same reason: the loader reads a document by asking it for names rather than walking it in order, so "here" is not a position it could honour, and "what you asked for is the base, what you wrote is yours" is the rule worth having. Two directories, yours first: `themes/` beside the root config -- beside the file that was loaded, so a config somewhere else (SLOSH_CONFIG, or one handed to --check) takes its themes with it -- and then /share/slosh/themes, compiled in from PREFIX. install(1) has been putting themes there all along and nothing could read them; now a shipped theme is nameable without being copied, and a file of yours with the same name shadows it, which is how a root-owned theme gets edited. A name, not a path. The directory is what makes a theme switchable, listable and shadowable, and a path silently does none of those, so `theme_name "../x.kdl"` is refused with a line pointing at `include`, which still works and is still the answer for a file somewhere a directory of names cannot reach. A theme that is not there is one complaint and no more (D9): the rest of the config applies, because losing your keybindings over a mistyped colour scheme would be the wrong trade. A theme file is read by the same loader, so it is watched like any other: saving one reloads the session wearing it, and the derivations (tab_status_fg, tab_idle_bg) run over the theme's own colours exactly as before. Switching without editing anything, over the socket a session already has: slosh -s main cmd theme # amber default* ... slosh -s main cmd '{"cmd":"theme","name":"amber"}' # now slosh -s main cmd '{"cmd":"theme","name":"amber","save":true}' The session holds the name over later reloads, so saving your config for an unrelated reason does not put the old colours back; `save` writes the theme_name line into the file, replacing the one already there and leaving every other line and comment alone -- dumping the whole config back over itself would reformat a hand-written file and drop its comments, which is not a fair price for changing a colour scheme. A name is tried on a throwaway config first, so a typo costs nothing. An empty name gives the answer back to the file. --dump-config stops writing colours: it writes the theme's name and the colours a config overrode by hand, so a dumped config keeps following its theme instead of freezing it. --dump-theme is the other half and is new: the resolved palette as a theme file, which is how you start one from the session in front of you rather than from an empty file. It is also what keeps contrib/themes/default.kdl honest -- that file is now the annotated reference (the commented palette moved there out of config.kdl, where it was 119 lines of colour in the middle of the prose), and a test compares it against the compiled-in one. While in there: tests/test_themes.py's "every theme sets every colour" guard had been grepping for `&c->`, the spelling before the colour table moved to offsetof, so it had been finding zero colours and passing for months. Fixed, with the derived and opt-in colours exempted for the reasons they are derived and opt-in, and with a check that the guard found a table at all.

tabs: idle tabs you can actually read across the room

2026-09-22T10:17:33Z

Seen next to the accent, the first plate was too polite to do the job it was added for: a 30% lift off the background under labels in the same #45454a the idle frames use. From another monitor the strip still read as one dark band with a blue block in it. Both ends move. tab_idle leaves the ambient chrome grey and becomes #8a8a95, because a tab you are not in is a place to go and has to be legible at a glance, where a dimmed pane border only has to be findable. The plate follows it to 43%, which is not a taste constant but a contrast ratio: the same step taken from a dark background upward and a light one downward lands at about 1.9:1 either way, so paper's #bdbebe on near-white and the default's #3b3b40 on black are the same amount of plate. The six themes in contrib named their idle tab colour as their frame grey, so each gets the same move in its own family -- 40% of the way from that grey to the colour the theme writes text in -- and their plates follow by derivation: amber #a67c26, mono #909090, paper #666a6e, phosphor #4a9c5d, slate #70789c, sl0p the house #8a8a95. Nobody who named a colour loses it; the derivation only ever fills in a theme's silence.

sidebar: a status colour mixed from the theme, not the chrome's flat grey

2026-09-10T14:38:09Z

tab_status_fg defaulted to the ambient grey on the argument that the slant already carried the distinction. True, and it looked it: the frame, the inactive labels, the pane count and the statuses were one colour, and the liveliest thing in the sidebar read as furniture. It is now 40% of the way from tab_count to tab_hover -- not the grey of the chrome round it, not the full accent it would shout in. Derived the same way rather than picked, so it lands in each theme's own family: a monochrome theme mixes two greys and stays monochrome, phosphor stays green, amber stays amber, and none of the seven in contrib needs a line adding to it. That the mix cannot invent a hue is the same argument the italic rests on, so both signals survive a colourless palette. tab_status_bg is still unset: a band is opt-in, and none is what a translucent terminal wants.

sidebar: statuses wear italic instead of an indent, and can wear colour

2026-09-10T14:32:10Z

Three columns of indent is a fifth of a sixteen-column sidebar, spent saying 'this belongs to the row above'. The slant says it in none: a status now starts in the same column its tab's name starts in, and is set in italic. That also survives the monochrome themes in contrib, where a colour-only distinction would have had nothing to spend. tab_status_fg / tab_status_bg are there for themes that do have colour to spend. The fg follows tab_count when a theme does not name it -- the same declared/derived split apply_scrolled makes -- so the six themes in contrib get coherent status rows without a line added to any of them. The bg is unset by default, because a band is opt-in and 'none' is what a translucent terminal wants; the row is padded so a band that *is* set covers the row rather than the words on it. Two things fell out. The padding loop existed three times and is now pad_cells. And cb_color wrote #000000 for an unset colour, so quietly pinned attach_bg -- 'gray ink on the terminal's own background', says its comment -- to a black band. Unset colours are now written commented out, the same trick the states block uses for what it wants re-derived rather than pinned.

themes: pin the attach tag to each palette's muted chrome tone

2026-09-02T13:11:59Z

Every shipped theme names attach_fg explicitly, reusing its own minbar colour -- the default gray suits the dark themes and nothing else, and paper's light ground proved it.

slosh: defaults most people can live in, said by shaders

2026-08-19T11:46:57Z

The out-of-the-box look, rethought as one piece: - the compiled-in palette calms down: muted blue #7aa2f7 on the same neutral darks, with the colours that mean something kept semantic -- amber bell, red-orange dead. sl0p stays one include away as the house style, and contrib/themes/default.kdl is the starting point written down (theme-tour shows it). - derived state defaults now actually follow the theme: the scrolled wash is rebuilt from scroll_bg after the theme block (it used to bake the compiled accent), and declaring a state -- in any file of an include chain -- still wins. The dump writes derived states as comments so C-a e cannot pin what is meant to keep following. - a bell you can see: the frame blinks three times in theme's bell colour then breathes until answered, and a soft diagonal shimmer -- the bell colour halved towards default_fg, width breathing on a sine -- crosses the body for the same 900ms. bell_indicator false silences all of it; states { bell { } } replaces it like any state. since carries the clock dependency, so an idle session pays nothing. - scrollback says where it continues: while scrolled, the viewport's top and bottom rows melt towards an edge with content past it and turn solid at the buffer's end. New expression variables above/below (lines hidden past each edge, own dependency bit, cached per scroll position), carried in shade_ctx_t -- SLOSH_SHADER_ABI 3 -> 4. - expressions survive the dump: a program keeps its source and cb_chain writes it back, so amount="(y % 2) * 40" no longer dumps as a number. - headers move to include/, -Iinclude everywhere; the plugin Makefile's SLOSH var becomes SLOSH_DIR because slosh exports SLOSH=1 into every pane it runs, and building from inside a session read that as a path. - comment drift culled where features outran the prose, and the derivation boilerplate folded into derived_pass()/ctx_scroll().

slosh: rename the project from sl0ppty

2026-08-18T19:26:00Z

sl0p + pty was error-prone to type and the zero made it worse; slosh (slop + sh) is one syllable, impossible to typo, and slosh.foo is ours. Mechanical rename everywhere it appears: binary, env vars (SLOSH, SLOSH_SESSION, SLOSH_BIN, SLOSH_CONFIG), socket dir (/tmp/slosh-, $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/slosh), config path (~/.config/slosh), header guards, src/sl0ppty.h -> src/slosh.h, contrib/sl0ppty-dev -> contrib/slosh-dev, the driving-slosh skill, docs and tests. The sl0ppi fork references and the sl0p theme stay: one is history, the other is the brand. The rename surfaced a latent bug in test_osc5577: the hello-reply answer always appeared on screen twice (ECHOCTL echo plus cat -v), but a seven-character implementation name happened to wrap the second copy across the 60-column boundary, so counting substrings in wrapped text found one and passed for the wrong reason. A five-character name moved the wrap and exposed it. The loop guard itself is correct -- with echo off before the request there is exactly one reply -- so the test now counts on de-wrapped text and tolerates the pane's own echo.

sl0ppty: modals get their own surface, and dim what is behind them

2026-08-15T09:32:47Z

Two things wrong with the first one, and both are about it being a modal rather than a pane that happens to float. The close button was invisible. It was drawn in the pane button colour on the finder background, and in the default theme those are the same value -- #45454a on #45454a -- so it only appeared when the pointer landed on it and the hover colour took over. That is the hazard of borrowing names from another surface: each one is right, and together they are nothing. A modal is its own surface now, with its own names (modal_bg, modal_fg, modal_border, modal_title, modal_button, modal_button_hover), a dark panel a shade lighter than the dimmed screen, a border in the accent, and a button chosen to be visible *without* the pointer on it. All six themes set them. And nothing behind it moved, so it read as another pane rather than as something in front. There is a scrim now, `modal_scrim` (0..255, 120 by default), and the pleasing part is that it is not a new mechanism: it is the shader pass aimed at the screen instead of at a pane. Same dim, same materialisation of default colours, no special case. It goes down after everything else is painted and before the modal, so the modal is the only thing at full brightness -- which is the whole idea, and is asserted rather than assumed. The shape is now reusable: modal_frame() draws the box, title, close button and hit, and returns the rect inside it; draw_scrim() is one line above it. The next modal is a function call and looks the same as this one. The finder is deliberately left alone. It is a picker rather than a modal -- it navigates, where a modal here dismisses on any key -- so unifying them would be making two things one because they are both rectangles.

sl0ppty: a pane outlives the program that was in it

2026-08-14T19:32:40Z

A pane whose program exited was reaped before the next paint. The pane went, and with it everything the program had printed -- including, always, the one line that would have explained why it stopped. Close the last one and the session went too, so a mistyped command in a fresh session closed the terminal you were typing in. Now the pane stays. It keeps its contents, writes one line into its own backlog saying how it ended -- `[process exited: status 3]`, `signal 9` -- says the same thing in its frame and in the status line, and offers the two verbs that still mean anything: ╰ exited: status 3 ──────────────────────────────[re-run]─[close]─╯ `[re-run]` runs the same argv in the same cwd in the *same pane*: same id, same node in the tree, same terminal. Nothing that referred to that pane has to be told anything, and the run that ended stays above the new one in the scrollback, which is what makes comparing two runs possible at all. C-a r and {"cmd":"rerun"} do the same thing; a live pane is refused rather than restarted, because "run it again" is not a request to kill something. Those buttons are the OSC 5577 row, not a second mechanism. A dead pane's own buttons are inert -- a click would write a report into a closed pty -- so the row is given over rather than added to. `close` is listed last, so it is drawn rightmost and is the one that survives a narrow frame: being unable to dismiss a dead pane is a trap, being unable to re-run one is an inconvenience. `dead` is a shader state now, which D13 said it could never be: it named a frame that could not be drawn, and now there is one. Dead panes drain to grey by default, so a wall of them reads at a glance. A collapsed header says "exited" in words as well, because the shader pass does not reach one and a flattened tab draws nothing else of a pane. Two things about this are load-bearing rather than incidental: - the pty fd is closed the moment EOF is seen. A pane that outlives its program stays in the poll set, and an fd at EOF is readable forever: the session would spin a core behind a pane that looks idle. - the exit status is collected with a bounded wait, never a blocking one. EOF means the program already closed its fds, so it is on its way out and a few hundred microseconds wins that race. A blocking waitpid would hang the whole session on one program that closes its terminal and keeps running; losing the race costs the words "status 0" and nothing else. `keep_dead false` restores the old behaviour for a one-shot layout that wants it. `panes` reports alive/exit_code/exit_signal, so a script can find the pane whose command failed and rerun it.

sl0ppty: contrib themes, a way to look at them, and a handover

2026-08-14T18:58:48Z

Six themes, each setting every colour the config knows about. A theme that has fallen behind silently keeps the compiled-in default for whatever it forgot, which looks like a bug in the theme rather than a missing line in it, so a test compares each file against the names config.c actually parses. contrib/theme-tour applies one to a running session, or cycles the lot. It does that by writing over the file the session was started with and letting the config watcher notice, which makes the showcase a demonstration of the watcher as well. HANDOVER.md is for the next context. It deliberately does not restate DESIGN.md or the README; it is the part that was only learnable by getting it wrong — which state is derived and which is intent and what happens when you confuse them, the dwell repaint list, that glyph width and glyph weight are different problems, that settle() in the harness is a sleep in disguise, and that a test pinned to a coordinate it does not care about will eventually look like a regression it is not.