Themes
Thirteen built-ins, your own YAML themes, iTerm2 imports, and a colour editor.
Settings → Appearance → Theme — or Change Theme… in the command palette — opens the theme picker.
Built in
| Light | Dark |
|---|---|
| Light (default) · One Light · Catppuccin Latte · Rosé Pine Dawn | Dark · Dracula · Harbor · One Dark Pro · Rosé Pine · Catppuccin Mocha · Gruvbox Dark · Nord · Tokyo Night |
Following the system
Turn on Sync with system and pick a theme for each appearance. Nermalfollows the OS live — no restart, no reload.
{
"theme_follow_system": true,
"theme_preset_light": "one_light",
"theme_preset_dark": "dracula"
}Legible bright colours
Some palettes put a bright ANSI colour so close to their own background that it
disappears. Legible bright colors (on by default) brightens or darkens those
just enough to be readable. Turn it off with theme_legible_palette: false if
you want the palette exactly as authored.
Transparency
Settings → Appearance → Transparency:
| Opacity | 0.2–1.0, applied to every theme. Follow theme hands the decision back to the theme's own opacity. |
| Blur | Blurs whatever is behind a translucent window (macOS). |
| Background material | Windows only: Auto, Blur, Mica, Mica Alt, Acrylic, Off. Only the presets your Windows build supports are listed. |
Writing your own
Open themes folder in Settings takes you to:
| macOS / Linux | ~/.config/Nermal/themes/ |
| Windows | %APPDATA%\Nermal\themes\ |
Drop a .yaml file in and it appears in the picker. The file name is the
theme's id; name is what is shown.
name: "Midnight"
background: "#0d1117"
foreground: "#c9d1d9"
accent: "#3fdd8c"
cursor: "#3fdd8c"
selection: "#264f78"
opacity: 0.95
blur: true
ansi:
normal: ["#484f58", "#ff7b72", "#3fb950", "#d29922", "#58a6ff", "#bc8cff", "#39c5cf", "#b1bac4"]
bright: ["#6e7681", "#ffa198", "#56d364", "#e3b341", "#79c0ff", "#d2a8ff", "#56d4dd", "#f0f6fc"]Everything except background, foreground, accent, and ansi is optional.
Gradients and images
background also takes two colours:
background: { top: "#0d1117", bottom: "#161b22" }
# or
background: { left: "#0d1117", right: "#161b22" }And a theme can carry an image behind the terminal:
background_image:
path: "/Users/me/Pictures/wall.jpg"
opacity: 0.25The Settings panel has a picker for both, so you rarely have to write this by hand.
Editing in the app
Select a built-in theme and hit Duplicate to edit — built-ins are read-only, so the editor works on your copy. From there you get every colour, including the sixteen ANSI slots, plus the background image controls. Changes are written back to your themes folder as YAML.
Importing from iTerm2
Drop an .itermcolors file into the themes folder and Nermalreads it directly —
no conversion step.
A theme file Nermalcould not load is listed in Settings under Not loaded from the themes folder, with the reason, rather than silently ignored.