#Appearance

theme:
  name: ember           # ember | ember-light | contrast | ansi | mono
  icons: auto           # auto | unicode | ascii
  density: compact      # compact | comfortable
  separators: false
  dateFormat: relative  # relative | absolute
  reducedMotion: false
  spinner: braille      # braille | line | dot
  logo: splash          # splash | compact | off

log:
  level: warn           # error | warn | info | debug

updateCheck: true

#Built-in themes

ansi deserves a note. At that tier your terminal theme supplies the actual hues, so the application looks like it belongs in your terminal. If you have a colour scheme you love, this is the setting you want.

#The tokens

Components name a role, never a hex value. Colour literals live in the theme package and nowhere else, so one token change reaches every screen.

#Surfaces and borders

#Text

#Meaning

Every value clears WCAG AA against its own background, and the ratios are computed on every commit. The lowest is text.muted at 5.09:1.

The light values are on the design page.

#Your own theme

Override a token by name, in hex or as an ANSI index from 0 to 255. Anything you leave out keeps its value from name, so a two-line theme is a complete theme.

theme:
  name: ember
  colors:
    accent.primary: "#d98a3d"
    status.error: 203

A token that does not exist, a malformed hex value, or an index outside 0 to 255 is reported at load with the file, the line, and the accepted values. A theme that drops a pair below WCAG AA still loads, and labdash theme preview shows you the ratio it produced.

To keep a theme in its own file, point at it:

theme:
  file: ~/.config/labdash/themes/solarized.yml

That file holds the same colors map. The path is read from disk; labdash does not fetch a theme over the network.

#Colour-profile detection

labdash reads your terminal's capability once at startup and renders to the tier it finds.

#Icons

theme:
  icons: auto        # auto | unicode | ascii

No patched font is required. labdash draws status with ordinary Unicode glyphs that a terminal font has carried for years.

Every glyph is one cell and every ASCII fallback is one character, so a screen rendered in either mode has identical column boundaries. In ascii mode no byte above 0x7F reaches the screen, which is what makes labdash usable on a serial console or inside a CI log.

auto reads your locale rather than probing your font. Three glyphs — ● running, ○ created, ◐ canceling — are classed as East Asian Ambiguous, meaning one cell in most terminals and two in a terminal configured for CJK text. On a CJK locale auto chooses ascii, because a glyph drawn two cells wide where one was measured shifts every column after it.

Set icons: unicode to keep the glyphs anyway, or icons: ascii to drop them everywhere.

#Density and separators

theme:
  density: comfortable   # two-line rows
  separators: true       # a rule between rows

Both are global rather than per tab. Mixing row heights between tabs costs the spatial memory that makes a terminal interface fast.

#Dates

theme:
  dateFormat: relative           # "2h ago"
  # or
  dateFormat: absolute
  datePattern: "2006-01-02 15:04"
  timezone: America/Lima

Tables show relative time and the preview shows absolute time, because the two are read differently. datePattern uses Go's reference-time layout. timezone takes an IANA name and defaults to the system zone.

#Motion

theme:
  spinner: braille       # braille | line | dot
  reducedMotion: false

The spinner runs at 10 frames per second on work that is actually running. braille is ⠋⠙⠹⠸⠼⠴⠦⠧⠇⠏; ASCII mode uses |/-\ whatever the setting says.

reducedMotion: true replaces the spinner with a static marker and drops the splash gradient. State is still communicated: the task line still names what is running.

#Accessibility switches

#The logo

theme:
  logo: splash      # splash | compact | off

splash shows the full wordmark, compact shows the two-row mark, off shows neither. The splash appears for at most 900 ms while Home loads, is skipped by any key, and never renders when output is not a terminal, when NO_COLOR is set, or below 60 columns. It never appears in the dashboard header.

#Operational switches

confirmQuit: true

#Theme preview

labdash theme preview

Renders every token, every status glyph and every state in your terminal, at your colour depth, with your font, which is the only place the question can be answered.