Themes in Skink: pick, preview and make your own

Run :theme (or pick colorscheme in :settings). Moving through the list previews each theme on your code; Enter keeps it, Esc puts the old one back.

:theme NAME switches straight away. Either way the choice is saved as "colorscheme" in settings.json.

Built-in themes

Name
auto	Tokyo Night, day or night to match the terminal’s background (the default)
tokyonight-night, tokyonight-storm, tokyonight-moon	Dark
tokyonight-day	Light
catppuccin-mocha / catppuccin-latte	Dark / light
gruvbox-dark / gruvbox-light	Dark / light
one-dark / one-light	Dark / light (Atom’s One)
high-contrast	Dark, maximum contrast

Short names work too: tokyonight, catppuccin, gruvbox, one, hc. More themes come as packages.

How auto finds light or dark

auto reads COLORFGBG when the terminal sets it. Otherwise Skink asks terminals known to answer (Ghostty, kitty, WezTerm, iTerm2, Terminal.app, Alacritty, foot, VS Code, GNOME and other VTE terminals, Konsole, tmux), waiting at most 250 ms. Anything else gets the dark theme.

Make your own

Save a file as ~/.config/skink/themes/NAME.json, then :theme NAME:

{
  "name": "Mine",
  "base": "gruvbox-dark",
  "colors": { "bg": "#1d2021", "blue": "#83a598" }
}

Only bg and fg are required. Colours you leave out come from base, and the rest is mixed from what you give.

The colour names: bg bg_dark bg_hl bg_sel bg_search bg_popup fg fg_dim comment line_nr guide blue cyan green orange purple red yellow teal type operator punct diff_ours diff_theirs diff_add diff_del debug_line.

Micro colorschemes

Micro colorschemes load as they are, from ~/.config/skink/colorschemes/NAME.micro or Micro’s own ~/.config/micro/colorschemes.

Good to know

• Terminal tabs take their 16 colours from the theme.
• On a terminal without truecolor, colours are mapped to the nearest of the 256.
• Icons come from your terminal’s Nerd Font; "icons": "ascii" switches to plain text.