Themes & appearance

25 original Harness themes#

Harness 2.0.1 includes 514 bundled themes: 25 original Harness palettes and 489 community themes. The original collection appears first in theme pickers and command-palette suggestions.

Choose Settings → Appearance → Theme, or search for a theme in the command palette. Harness Deep Sea is a near-black blue-teal palette. The 25 originals include 17 dark and eight light choices, with coordinated cursors and selections.

Start with a theme#

Harness includes 514 built-in themes. Harness Default is pure black; Harness Navy and Harness Light provide dark-blue and light starting points. Choose colors in Settings → Colors → Theme, and appearance behavior in Settings → Appearance.

Follow macOS appearance with separate light and dark theme choices, or keep the terminal fixed to the appearance you prefer.

Save, export, and import#

Save the current colors as a named theme or export a .harnesstheme file from Settings → Colors → Theme. Double-click an exported theme, or use Open With → Harness, to install it and optionally apply its colors. Saved and imported themes appear in the theme menu.

A theme is for appearance. Use the migration guide for terminal-config imports and the Lua guide for executable configuration.

Understand color and rendering choices#

Accurate sRGB is the default. Display-P3 vivid color is opt-in and converted deliberately. Program output is not automatically recolored to match your theme; theme-based output recoloring is a separate choice.

Rendering supports ligatures, procedural block and box-drawing glyphs, and inline Sixel, Kitty, and iTerm2 images. Live reflow adapts terminal text when the window changes size.

harness-cli color-check
harness-cli theme-preview --theme "Harness Default"

These diagnostic commands produce deterministic local output and do not require a running daemon. They help distinguish a palette choice from an application’s explicit color output.

Choose how much interface you see#

Comfortable density gives panes inset cards and headers. Compact density uses narrow borders. Tune padding, font, opacity, cursor behavior, and minimum contrast to suit the amount of information you keep on screen.

When importing another terminal’s config, the font face can transfer, but font size remains Harness-owned. An import should not be interpreted as a promise that every source-terminal setting is supported.

Pane spacing, window size, and identity#

Settings → Appearance → Panes controls comfortable-mode spacing from 0 to 24 points, with 8 as the default. Compact mode stays flush. New windows start at 100 columns by 30 rows based on the chosen font and padding; remembering size and position is enabled by default.

The optional window-owned machine indicator is off by default and can be enabled from the chrome menu. Agent identities use compact fixed-brand badges. Old agent-color preferences can still be read, but the agent-color pickers are removed in 2.0.

Native scrollbar dragging and track clicks follow macOS preferences. Native color emoji and longer combining sequences are preserved through rendering and terminal operations; color choices and themes do not replace the original text.