Terminal and App Themes

Reach ships with themes and can install more. A theme is data, not code — a set of colour tokens the whole application reads — so switching one repaints every panel, not just the terminal.

Switching

Settings → General → Theme. The change applies immediately and is remembered.

Every theme declares whether it is dark or light. That is not decorative: it drives the root class, so the native window chrome, the scrollbars and the form controls follow the theme rather than staying whatever the operating system thought.

Installing more

Settings → General → Theme → Browse, which reads the theme registry.

Each entry carries a name, an author, a version, a one-line description and a declared appearance, so you know whether a theme is light or dark before installing it.

How a theme is verified

The registry entry names an HTTPS URL for the theme’s JSON and a SHA-256 hash of the bytes at that URL. Reach downloads the file, hashes it, and installs it only if the two match.

That matters because the registry and the file it points at are separate things. Without the hash, anyone able to change the file at that URL could change what gets installed on every machine that installs it afterwards. With it, changing the file breaks the install instead.

Themes contain no executable code — only colour values — so a malicious theme cannot do more than look wrong. The hash is about knowing you got the theme the registry described.

Using your own registry

The registry URL is a setting, not a constant. Point it at your own JSON file and the Browse list becomes yours — useful if your team has house themes, or if you would rather not fetch from a public URL at all.

The default is:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alexandrosnt/reach-themes-registry/main/themes.json

There is a Reset beside it that puts the default back.

Removing one

Installed themes can be uninstalled from the same panel. If the theme you remove is the one in use, Reach falls back to a built-in one rather than leaving you with no colours.

Plugins and recipes use the same registry pattern, with the same hash-before-install rule. See Plugins and Recipes.