Themes, styles & appearance

Baton separates colors (the theme) from shapes (the style). Any style works with any theme.

#Styles

/style (or settings → Looks → Style) opens a gallery: moving through it previews each style on the whole app and in a miniature, Enter keeps it, Escape puts back exactly what you had.

A style is a preset over these settings, each of which can be changed on its own (the style then shows as custom):

style = "modern" in a config file is enough: style keys you don't set yourself follow the chosen style.

#Themes

Pick a theme live with ctrl+t: moving the selection previews the theme and Enter keeps it. You can also use /theme nord, baton theme set nord, [ui] theme = "nord" or BATON_THEME=nord. baton theme list shows them all with colour swatches.

Built in:

• baton (default) and baton-light
• Catppuccin: mocha, macchiato, frappé, latte
• Tokyo Night: night, storm, day
• Rosé Pine: main, moon, dawn
• Gruvbox: dark and light
• Nord, Dracula
• Everforest: dark and light
• Ayu: dark, mirage, light
• Monokai Pro
• Night Owl and Light Owl
• SynthWave '84 (synthwave-84)
• Poimandres, Vesper, Oxocarbon
• Nightfox and Dayfox
• Material: Palenight and Ocean (material-palenight, material-ocean)
• Cyberdream: dark and light
• Flexoki: dark and light
• Kanagawa: wave, dragon, lotus
• One Dark / One Light
• Solarized: dark and light
• GitHub: dark and light
• colorblind and colorblind-light (Okabe–Ito: blue for added/success, vermillion for removed/error)
• high-contrast and mono
• system: built from your terminal's own palette (read via OSC 4/10/11)

With appearance = "auto", Baton asks the terminal whether its background is dark or light and switches to the theme's counterpart if needed (for example mocha → latte, ayu-mirage → ayu-light, nightfox → dayfox).

Every built-in theme meets WCAG contrast against its background: at least 7:1 for text, 4.5:1 for muted text and diff lines, and 3:1 for subtle text. Where an upstream palette falls short, only the affected text tone is lifted just enough to pass (marked in packages/themes/src/builtin.ts); everything else is the upstream value.

#Theme files

Put JSON files in ~/.config/baton/themes/ or <project>/.baton/themes/. The file name is the theme name. The format is OpenCode's, so OpenCode themes work as-is: Baton also reads ~/.config/opencode/themes/.

{
  "defs": { "ink": "#0f1117", "paper": "#e6e1cf", "ember": { "dark": "#ff8f40", "light": "#c2410c" } },
  "theme": {
    "background": "ink",
    "text": "paper",
    "primary": "ember",
    "agentClaude": "ember",
    "backgroundPanel": "none",
    "accent": 39
  }
}

A color value can be:

• a hex code
• a name from defs
• another token's name
• { "dark": …, "light": … }
• an ANSI number from 0 to 255
• "none" (transparent)

Tokens you leave out fall back to Baton's default theme, so a theme can be three lines long.

base16 / base24: drop a scheme .yaml file (with base00…base0F) into the same folders. Hundreds of schemes from tinted-theming work this way.

#Tokens

#Beyond colors

#Logos

Logos are drawn with the Kitty graphics protocol (kitty, Ghostty, WezTerm, Konsole, iTerm2, Warp) or Sixel (foot, WezTerm, Windows Terminal, VS Code), as detected by OpenTUI. On other terminals Baton falls back to coloured glyphs.

Inside tmux, run set -g allow-passthrough on for logos to work. To turn logos off, set BATON_NO_IMAGES=1 or ui.icons = "unicode".