Themes & appearance

Nexis is highly themeable — from the editor palette down to the terminal colors and the file-explorer icons.

Settings → Themes, listing the built-in palettes and the Lumen import and export buttons.

Built-in themes

Nexis ships 22 built-in themes, all with light and dark variants:

• 17 Nexis palettes: Nexis Default, Halcyon, Meridian, Cinder, Aurelian, Thicket, Vermillion, Hotwire, Tangerine, Sulfur, Acid, Absinthe, Cyanotype, Glacier, Ultramarine, Ultraviolet, and Synthwave.
• 5 credited community palettes: Tokyo Night, Catppuccin, Nord, Gruvbox, and Rosé Pine.

The Nexis palettes share one generated OKLCH lightness ramp and build-enforced contrast floors. File-tree icons retint onto the active terminal palette, while brand-logo fallbacks keep their original colors.

Nexis Default also has an optional rainbow hover accent under Settings → Themes. It colors eligible icon/text marks and the live AI aurora, not whole button surfaces. It is deliberately quiet and leaves file-type icons alone, since their colours say what kind of file it is.

Type

The interface is set in Geist and code, the terminal and --font-mono in Geist Mono, both as variable fonts so every terminal weight renders properly. Space Grotesk is used only where Nexis speaks in its own voice: dialog titles, empty states, section headers and the welcome wordmark.

High contrast

Settings → General → Contrast: System, Standard or High (or the “Toggle high contrast” command). It works on top of any theme: muted text, borders and hover surfaces are re-derived from the theme’s own colours, so each theme keeps its character. Muted text clears WCAG AAA, borders clear 3:1, and focus is always a visible 2px outline.

Custom themes

• Create, import, and delete .nexis-theme files.
• A live swatch preview shows colors as you pick them.
• The theme editor opens any .nexis-theme directly in the code editor, so a theme is just a file you can version and share.

Lumen palettes and scenes

Nexis exchanges colours with Lumen, the WebGL wallpaper generator, through small versioned JSON files. There is no background sync; every exchange is a file you choose.

flowchart LR
  subgraph N["Nexis · Settings → Themes"]
    NT["Active theme"]
    CT["New custom theme<br/>(editable, removable)"]
    HF["Folder you pick<br/>lumen/&lt;name&gt;.nexis-lumen-scene.json"]
  end
  subgraph L["Lumen"]
    LP["Palette"]
    LS["Scene: generator · seed · params"]
  end
  NT -- "export palette<br/>nexis-lumen-palette v1" --> LP
  LP -- "export palette" --> CT
  LS -- "scene snapshot<br/>(palette only is used)" --> CT
  LS -- "workspace handoff<br/>nexis-lumen-workspace v1" --> HF
  HF -. "palette" .-> CT
  HF -. "reopen later" .-> LS

• Importing creates a new custom theme (first colour → background, second → accent, text chosen for contrast). Delete the theme to undo the import.
• A workspace handoff asks you to pick the destination folder and never overwrites an existing scene. A path inside the JSON never authorizes a workspace.
• Nexis never runs the Lumen scene; animation state, PTYs and credentials never cross the boundary. Unknown format versions are rejected.

Backgrounds

Set a background image with adjustable opacity (0–100%) and blur (0–64 px) for a personalized workspace.

Icon themes

The file explorer supports Catppuccin and Material icon themes, with a vscode-icons fallback so ecosystem folders (NuGet, Maven, Kotlin, iOS, Flutter, MongoDB, and more) still get purpose-built art.

Configuring

Themes are set under Settings → Themes. See configuration → themes for details on authoring your own.