Themes

tern has no theme of its own to configure. It wears your terminal’s.

Omarchy

By default tern reads the active Omarchy theme from:

~/.config/omarchy/current/theme

When omarchy-theme-set repoints that symlink, tern picks up the new colors within about two seconds, with no restart. It checks the directory and the theme files’ modification times every two seconds. Editing a theme file in place works the same way.

Which file it reads

tern tries these in order and uses the first that has colors in it:

File	What it reads
colors.toml	background, foreground, accent, selection_background, selection_foreground, color0–color15
alacritty.toml	[colors.primary], [colors.selection], [colors.normal], [colors.bright]
kitty.conf	background, foreground, active_border_color (as the accent), selection_*, color0–color15
ghostty.conf	background, foreground, selection-*, palette = N=#rrggbb

From those, tern builds its own palette. The accent is the theme’s accent (or blue, color4). Muted and subtle text are blends of foreground into background. The selection is a quiet tint of the accent, which reads better in a dense list than a full-strength highlight. Quoted mail is colored by depth with blue, magenta, cyan and green.

Other locations

Without Omarchy, point tern at any directory holding one of those files:

[ui]
theme_dir = "~/.config/tern/theme"

Or set it in the environment:

TERN_THEME_DIR=~/themes/gruvbox tern

theme_dir in the config wins over TERN_THEME_DIR, which wins over the Omarchy default. If no theme is found, tern uses its built-in Tokyo Night. Settings → Theme (, then 5) shows which theme is active, its palette and a preview.

Background and transparency

[ui]
paint_background = false   # default: leave the terminal's background, so transparency works

Set it to true to fill the screen with the theme’s background color instead.

Icons

Folder, flag and attachment glyphs come from a Nerd Font, which Omarchy ships (JetBrainsMono Nerd Font). If your terminal font doesn’t have them:

[ui]
icons = false