Two more applications that keep their own palette and so never followed
the desktop. btop was on "Default" and had never been themed at all;
tmux had Tokyo Night Moon hardcoded across seventeen lines, which meant
a dark status bar sitting under a light terminal in light mode.
Both themes are authored rather than borrowed. btop ships a
"tokyo-night" theme, but it is the Night variant (#1a1b26) where the
rest of this desktop is Moon (#222436), and two Tokyo Nights side by
side read as a mistake; it ships no Tokyo Night light theme at all.
Colours come from kitty's theme files so a terminal and what runs inside
it cannot disagree.
tmux follows kitty's shape: the colours move to themes/, tmux.conf
sources a generated current-theme.conf, and running servers are
re-sourced so an open session changes immediately rather than at next
launch. btop is different -- it OWNS btop.conf and rewrites it on exit,
so only the color_theme line is edited in place and the file is not
symlinked into the repository. btop reads its theme once at startup, so
a running instance keeps the old colours; forcing a restart would kill a
process the user is watching.
The tmux light theme took two passes. Mapping the palette role-for-role
put the standard Day accents on a mid-grey panel at 2.74:1 and 2.94:1 --
under the 3:1 floor, on a bar you read at a glance. It now uses Day's
darker accent variants on a lighter panel: 4.42:1 and 4.17:1, and
5.01:1 / 4.73:1 for the light text inside the inverted blocks.
The helper also now reports every target rather than only kitty. Saying
"kitty: applied" while silently skipping three other applications is
how a half-applied theme goes unnoticed.
Not changed: bat is configured with --theme ansi, which follows the
terminal's own palette, so it already tracks kitty with nothing to do.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L