SparkleBIOS
Reactive Pixels / SparkleBIOS / Ghostty theme
Rainbows and Unicorns, a Ghostty theme. The name is the only joke.
A serious 1985 colour terminal theme for Ghostty. Ten variants share one idea: the rainbow is simply the ANSI colours your tools were already going to use. Contrast is checked, and a light half lets Ghostty follow the system appearance.
The decisions
- Glass, not black. The lead background is the colour of a switched-off tube with a breath of violet, so warm white text sits in front of it.
- All six stripes are addressable. Orange rides in bright red (ANSI 9), so the classic stripe order is ANSI 2, 3, 9, 1, 5, 4. Any tool that prints those in sequence draws the stripes without knowing it.
- Nothing was thrown away. The original stripe purple is too dark to read on glass, so it became the selection colour.
- The cursor is the horn. A gold block, blinking. The one place the theme winks.
- Bold is not bright. Set
bold-is-bright = false. Modern tools assume bold means weight. - Contrast is checked. Every chromatic colour in the lead variant clears 4.5:1 against its background, and a test fails if a theme file and its documentation ever disagree.
The lead palette, Six Stripes
Background #0E0E13, foreground #E6E3D8, cursor #FCB827, selection #963D97.
| ANSI | Normal | Bright |
|---|---|---|
| black | #23232D | #6F6E7D |
| red | #E0453F | #F5821F |
| green | #62BB47 | #8AD46B |
| yellow | #FCB827 | #FFD35C |
| blue | #1D9BE3 | #5DB9F0 |
| magenta | #BB62C0 | #D68ADB |
| cyan | #35C9BE | #6FDDD3 |
| white | #C9C6BC | #FFFDF5 |
The ten variants
| Name | Theme file | |
|---|---|---|
| Six Stripes | rainbows-and-unicorns | The lead. The six-colour stripe set of 1977 mapped onto ANSI and tuned as light coming through glass: slightly softened, never neon. Every chromatic colour clears 4.5:1. |
| Paper White | rainbows-and-unicorns-paper | The light half. Page-white in the manner of a 1984 compact computer, stripes darkened to ink, selection as true reverse video. |
| EGA '85 | rainbows-and-unicorns-ega | The 1984 sixteen-colour PC palette, brown included. Hues kept, luminance of the normal row corrected so blue on black is readable. The bright row is left raw. |
| Workbench 1.0 | rainbows-and-unicorns-workbench | A 1985 home computer desktop: blue ground, white text, orange cursor. The blue is a shade deeper than the historical one so text holds up all day, and the rainbow goes pastel because on a blue ground it has to. |
| Mane | rainbows-and-unicorns-mane | The palette of the unicorn itself. Every colour is lifted from the sprite: the six bands of the mane, the pink of its ear, the lavender of its shading, the gold of the horn as the cursor. |
| Miami | rainbows-and-unicorns-miami | Pastel neon on deep navy: flamingo pink, pool teal, a sunset that refuses to end. The loud one. |
| Arcade | rainbows-and-unicorns-arcade | Cabinet neon on true black. Every colour is turned up as far as it goes, the way a marquee is. The cursor is the green of a vector monitor. |
| VHS | rainbows-and-unicorns-vhs | The blue of a video recorder with nothing to play, warm white text, and colours a little washed out, as if the tape has been rented a few times. |
| Den | rainbows-and-unicorns-den | Wood panelling, amber lamps and a carpet nobody chose. Warm browns and one good amber, for long evenings in front of the family computer. |
| Sorbet | rainbows-and-unicorns-sorbet | The soft one. Six pastels on deep plum, with peach riding in bright red where the other variants keep their orange. Every colour clears 9:1 on the plum. |
Install
The themes ship inside SparkleBIOS and install into Ghostty with one command. They are plain Ghostty theme files, so you can also copy the one you want by hand.
bios theme list # the ten
bios theme use miami # install them and switch Ghostty to oneBeside the themes, the repository's extras/ folder has a cursor trail shader and tool colours for ls, bat, fzf, delta and friends that follow whichever variant you are using.