Random Access Themes

Dark themes for terminals and editors — six phosphor tubes and four OLED-black flavors.

At a glance

• 6 phosphor themes — one terminal tube each, hierarchy from brightness alone
• 4 OLED-black flavors: Random Access, Veridis, Voyager, Amnesiac
• 6–7 terminal ports each: Ghostty, WezTerm, iTerm2, Alacritty, kitty, Windows Terminal, Pi
• Editor ports today: VS Code, Sublime Text, Zed, Neovim (Veridis)
• Two pipelines, both validated: flavors generate from palette YAML, phosphors generate from their pi theme — see the manifest
• Every thinking ramp is derived and enforced: escalation is chroma, not lightness

See the demo preview for the flagship terminal render and rebuild commands.

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The phosphor family

Six themes, one terminal tube each. A real CRT could not show many hues, so it built hierarchy out of luminance — dim for what is resting, bright for what matters, a hot peak for what is happening now — and these spend a single phosphor the same way. Love letters to specific hardware: a VT520 under amber, a VT640 radar scope, the WOPR's blue room.

They are the refined half of this repo and they set its standards. The thinking-ramp rule every flavor now uses came from here, along with the validator that enforces it, and nothing in the family blinks — which the Ghostty exports now state outright rather than having the generator overrule.

Their pi themes are hand-authored and canonical: the terminal exports are derived from that JSON rather than the other way round, because these arrived finished and a pipeline built to spread a cool-spectrum palette across four flavors would only have made them worse.

Theme	Tube	Glow	Ports
reckoner-exect	EXECT-100 / DEC VT520	amber phosphor	pi + 6 terminals
reckoner-scope	DEC VT640	P1 green	pi + 6 terminals
reckoner-wopr	VT100	navy + cyan	pi + 6 terminals
reckoner-darkspace	dark.spaceAMP	teal wireframe	pi + 6 terminals
reckoner-dusk	—	violet on blue-black	pi + 6 terminals
reckoner-factory	—	safety orange on true black	pi + 6 terminals

Full descriptions, the brightness ladder, and the harness-footer vocabulary they were tuned against: docs/phosphor-themes.md.

They also brought the thinking-ramp rule the generator now uses — see below.

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Flavors

Four variants, one philosophy: dark surfaces, restrained UI chrome, and a cool-spectrum accent family.

Flavor	Named after	Accent	Background	Description
Random Access	Daft Punk — Random Access Memories	#00ffb2 mint	#000000 pure OLED black	Flagship. Mint-forward, green-family syntax, zero warm hues
Veridis	Daft Punk — Veridis Quo	#00ffb2 mint	#0f0e0d warm black	Warm-dark base with crisp cream text and electric mint
Voyager	Daft Punk — Voyager	#2ccfc0 teal	#0f0e0d warm black	Warm-dark base with a brighter teal-led accent family
Amnesiac	Radiohead — Amnesiac	#7b93ff indigo	#0f0e0d warm black	Warm-dark base with cool indigo contrast and sharper separation

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The day cycle

Five themes named for the hours, darkest to brightest. Four are ports — their colours belong to upstream projects and are reproduced unchanged.

Theme	Hour	Palette	Upstream	Licence
madrugada	before dawn	blue-violet night	Tokyo Night	Apache-2.0
amanecer	dawn	rose and gold	Rosé Pine	MIT
mediodia	noon	Latte, ink on paper	Catppuccin	MIT
atardecer	late afternoon	burnt ochre, olive	Gruvbox Material	MIT
ocaso	sundown	amber on ink	none identified	—
anochecer	nightfall	mauve	Catppuccin	MIT

Only pi's thinking ramp was rebuilt, because that ramp is not something those projects define and every port arrived with one that ended on its own error colour. Full detail, and the statement of changes Apache-2.0 requires, in docs/day-cycle.md and NOTICE.

Why it looks different

Most dark themes spread warm accents across the screen. Random Access Themes deliberately compress the visual range:

• dark surfaces stay dark
• syntax lives in a tight accent family
• text stays high-contrast and calm
• WCAG contrast is treated as a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have

The flagship Random Access palette reaches 17.44:1 text/background contrast and every foreground color clears WCAG AA against the base background.

See the full rationale in docs/design.md.

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Supported Ports

Terminals — phosphor family

Terminal	Amber EXECT	Green Scope	Cyan WOPR	Teal Darkspace	Violet Dusk	Orange Factory
Ghostty	conf	conf	conf	conf	conf	conf
WezTerm	toml	toml	toml	toml	toml	toml
iTerm2	itermcolors	itermcolors	itermcolors	itermcolors	itermcolors	itermcolors
Alacritty	toml	toml	toml	toml	toml	toml
kitty	conf	conf	conf	conf	conf	conf
Windows Terminal	json	json	json	json	json	json
Pi	json	json	json	json	json	json

Pi is the source for these six; the terminal rows are derived from it.

Terminals — flavors

Terminal	Random Access	Veridis	Voyager	Amnesiac
Ghostty	conf	conf	conf	conf
WezTerm	toml	toml	toml	toml
iTerm2	itermcolors	itermcolors	itermcolors	itermcolors
Alacritty	toml	toml	toml	toml
kitty	conf	conf	conf	conf
Windows Terminal	json	json	json	json
Pi	json	json	json	json

Editors

Editor	Flavor
VS Code	Veridis
Sublime Text	Veridis
Zed	Veridis
Neovim	Veridis

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Install

One-line install (no clone)

Fetch a generated theme straight to its standard location — no clone, no Python, no build step:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sainzs/random-access-themes/main/scripts/get.sh | bash -s -- ghostty

Targets: alacritty · wezterm · ghostty · kitty · iterm2 · windows-terminal · pi · all. The pi target installs every theme in the family — all sixteen — not just one. Add --dry-run to preview, or pin a release with RAT_REF=v0.1.2. Existing files are backed up before they are overwritten. See scripts/get.sh.

From a clone

Ghostty

bash scripts/install.sh ghostty

Writes the full config to ~/.config/ghostty/config and stubs the macOS Library config to prevent duplicate entries.

WezTerm

cp themes/wezterm/random-access-theme.toml ~/.config/wezterm/colors/

Then in wezterm.lua:

config.color_scheme = "Random Access Theme"

iTerm2

bash scripts/install.sh iterm2

Then: Profiles > Colors > Color Presets > Import and select the .itermcolors file.

Alacritty

# In alacritty.toml
[import]
paths = ["/path/to/themes/alacritty/random-access-theme.toml"]

kitty

echo "include /path/to/themes/kitty/random-access-theme.conf" >> ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf

Windows Terminal

Add the scheme from themes/windows-terminal/random-access-theme.json into the "schemes" array in your settings JSON.

Pi

bash scripts/install.sh pi --theme reckoner-scope

Links all ten themes into ~/.pi/agent/themes/ and sets that one active. Then /reload. By hand, if you prefer:

for t in themes/pi/*.json; do ln -sf "$PWD/$t" ~/.pi/agent/themes/; done

Check that the theme actually took. pi resolves a theme by the name field inside the JSON, not by filename, and if the name in settings.json does not resolve initTheme falls back to its built-in dark silently — no warning, no log line, and a dark theme is plausible enough that you can look straight at the fallback for weeks. A theme with a / in it, a package-qualified name, a typo: all identical from the outside.

python3 -c "import json;print(json.load(open('$HOME/.pi/agent/settings.json'))['theme'])"
ls ~/.pi/agent/themes/ | sed 's/.json$//'

The first must appear in the second. themes/pi/ holds ten: the four flavors and the six phosphor tubes in docs/phosphor-themes.md.

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Integrations

Bonus configs for tools that inherit ANSI colors or benefit from explicit theming:

Tool	File	What it does
tmux	integrations/tmux.conf	Status bar and pane border colors
fzf	integrations/fzf-export.sh	FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS color env vars
bat	integrations/bat-config	Syntax highlighting theme
delta	integrations/gitconfig-delta	Git diff colors
Starship	integrations/starship.toml	Prompt styling
eza	integrations/eza-export.sh	EZA_COLORS env vars

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Palette

Flagship Random Access palette — all colors stay in a green-family range, including ANSI remaps.

Role	Hex	Purpose
bg	#000000	Pure OLED black
text	#d8efe9	Primary text — green-tinted near-white
subtle	#9cb7af	Secondary text, labels
dimText	#6f8d86	Comments, disabled
mint	#00ffb2	Hero accent, cursor
green	#4ade80	Functions, success
teal	#35d5c5	Quotes, borders
jade	#66e3c4	Keywords
aqua	#8bf5dd	Numbers, highlights
emerald	#26c994	Errors (no warm red)
lime	#a2e5b8	Strings, warnings

All foreground colors pass WCAG AA against #000000. Most reach AAA.

Thinking levels

Pi shows how hard the model is being driven as one escalating colour, six levels of it. Escalation is chroma, not lightness. Each ramp is derived in HSL from the palette's quiet text up to its hero accent, holds the accent's hue for the whole climb, and stops at the accent — never past it. A phosphor driven harder gets more vivid, not more white.

It used to be six fixed palette slots — subtle, emerald, teal, jade, mint, aqua — the same list for every flavor, which was not a ramp at all: it fell at minimal, fell again at high, and finished on aqua at 75% lightness. Amnesiac was worse, ending at 89% having crossed 208° of hue, so asking for more reasoning turned the indicator pale and then a different colour entirely.

flavor	off	xhigh	hue held
Random Access	#6f8d84	#00ffb2	0°
Veridis	#71817c	#00ffb2	1°
Voyager	#718180	#2ccfc0	2°
Amnesiac	#717481	#7a93ff	1°

make validate enforces it across every theme in themes/pi/, flavors and phosphors alike: no level above 74% lightness, none darker than the level below it, and no more than 40° of hue across the ramp. The check came from the reckoner project, where it was written after watching the top level go white on a screen recording.

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Development

Requirements: Python 3.9+, pyyaml

pip install pyyaml

Command	What it does
make generate	Regenerate terminal themes from palette YAML
make visuals	Regenerate README SVG visuals from palette YAML
make validate	Structural + freshness + drift checks
make contrast	Full WCAG contrast report
make check	Generate + validate + contrast
make phosphor-exports	Derive phosphor terminal exports from themes/pi/reckoner-*.json
make phosphor	Regenerate the phosphor screenshots in assets/phosphor/
make release	Build release artifacts to dist/

Installing to this machine is scripts/install.sh, which takes --theme <name> (default reckoner-scope), links every pi theme, writes the Ghostty config from themes/ghostty/<theme>.conf, and backs up anything it replaces:

bash scripts/install.sh --dry-run          # see it first
bash scripts/install.sh --theme reckoner-wopr
bash scripts/install.sh pi                 # one target only

Ghostty colours are read from the generated export rather than written into the installer. They used to be a heredoc in that script — a second copy of the flagship palette that no generator touched and no check compared, in the one file whose job is to be the last word on what lands on a machine.

The source-of-truth map lives in docs/manifest.md, and the public preview flow is documented in docs/demo.md.

Each flavor has its own palette file in palette/. Edit the YAML, then regenerate the assets you changed.

README visuals in assets/*.svg are generated by scripts/render_repo_visuals.py.

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Design Tokens

The canonical palette is also exported as reusable design tokens for web and UI projects:

Artifact	Path	Use case
W3C-style tokens	tokens/design-tokens.json	All four flavors in one importable file
CSS variables	tokens/random-access-theme.css	Web projects using the flagship palette
Tailwind config	tokens/tailwind.js	Tailwind extend colors snippet

Run make tokens to regenerate them after editing a palette.

Portfolio

random-access-themes is the design system of the Random Access agent toolchain — four small packages that compose into one maintainer surface:

Package	Layer	What it does
santiagosainz-skills	Workflow	Portable maintainer skills: review, planning, debug, verify, handoff
reckoner	Memory	Agent memory, auto-verification, and guardrails
registro	Reporting	Agent work report CLI and dashboard
random-access-themes	Design system	OLED-black themes and tokens shared across the toolchain

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. The only files that should be edited manually are the palette YAML files in palette/ plus repo docs / scripts. Theme files in themes/ and README SVGs in assets/ are generated.

License

MIT for everything original here.

The five day-cycle themes are ports and keep their upstream licences — Tokyo Night is Apache-2.0, the rest MIT. See NOTICE for the copyright holders and the record of what was changed.