Themes

A Theme is a palette of semantic color roles, and it is the only styling most apps touch: every component derives its default look from roles such as background, surface, field, primary, secondary, accent, destructive, warning, border, ring, and cursor. Most roles have a foreground companion chosen to contrast with the fill. Two less obvious ones: ring is the focus accent around a container (a focused pane's border, the dialog frame), and cursor is the text caret.

Choose one built-in preset directly:

rust

use ratcn::Theme;

let theme = Theme::catppuccin();
ratcn.render(frame, &state, &theme, |ctx| {
    // Declare components.
});

The presets are default_dark, terminal, catppuccin, gruvbox, nord, tokyo_night, and solarized. Theme::presets() returns all seven in stable picker order.

To author a palette, start from a preset and replace the roles you care about. (Theme stores its display name as a &'static str, so authored names must be static in the current API.)

rust

use ratatui::style::Color;
use ratcn::Theme;

const THEME: Theme = Theme {
    name: "Operations",
    accent: Color::LightCyan,
    warning: Color::LightYellow,
    ..Theme::default_dark()
};

Pass the same theme to runtime rendering and paint-only widgets so both halves of the library agree. To recolor a single component, use that component's .style(|theme| ...) override — see each component page's Styling section — rather than adding a palette role.

Themes ​

Themes