Making a theme

A theme is the color part of a pack. Applying a theme with /glowup theme <name> recolors the pack you are using and keeps its row style, borders and extras. Besides colors, a theme can set the spinner words, the heart characters and the small glyphs glowup puts on tool rows.

glowup ships seven themes. classic, the default, uses Claude Code's own colors; the others are glowup, aurora, dusk, cyberpunk, vaporwave and high-contrast. Themes color glowup's text and leave the terminal background alone.

Making oneCopy Anchor Link

A theme is a JSON file (comments allowed) in ~/.claude/glowup/themes, or $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR/glowup/themes if you set that variable. The file name is the theme's name, so sunset.json is applied with /glowup theme sunset.

You only need to write what differs from an existing theme: name it in extends and glowup fills in the rest. A theme without extends starts from classic.

This one starts from vaporwave, changes six colors, and sets its own spinner words, hearts and two glyphs:

{
  // The name is what `/glowup theme add` uses to save the file.
  "name": "sunset",
  "extends": "vaporwave",

  "colors": {
    "accent": "#ff8a4c",
    "text": "#fff1e6",
    "dim": "#b89a8c",
    "faint": "#4a2f2a",
    "read": "#ffd166",
    "fail": "#ff5d73"
  },

  "spinner": { "words": ["Basking", "Setting", "Glowing"] },

  "glyphs": { "edit": "✦", "agent": "❖" },

  "band": { "hearts": ["♦", "♢"] }
}

Every field is optional. The theme reference lists them all with their limits.

When it does not loadCopy Anchor Link

If something in the file is wrong, /glowup theme <name> prints the reason and keeps your current theme; at session start, glowup falls back to classic and shows the reason in a notice. The usual causes are a color that is not written as six hex digits (#d77757, not #d77), a glyph that is an emoji or more than one character, a trailing comma, or a spinner word over 24 characters.

SharingCopy Anchor Link

Host the file anywhere it can be fetched over https://, such as a gist. Anyone can then install it:

/glowup theme add https://example.com/sunset.json
/glowup theme sunset

For theme add the file needs a "name" of lowercase letters, digits and dashes that is not one of the built-in names. A theme is plain data limited to 64 KB, so installing one cannot run code, and glowup rejects characters that could move the cursor or hide text.

To get a theme included in glowup itself, open a theme submission issue on GitHub with the file and a screenshot, or a pull request that adds it.