Color science
- Material You palettes (HCT/CAM16: Tonal Spot, Vibrant, Expressive,
Fidelity, Fruit Salad, Monochrome) from your wallpaper. Seeds are re-ranked
so vivid colors lead, never a grey sky.
- Mandara presets inspired by Alexandria: Mandara Corniche, Montaza
Twilight, Mandara Obsidian, Qaitbay Citadel, Pharos Night and
Stanley Sunset. Community favorites are included too: Catppuccin, Rosé
Pine, Kanagawa, Tokyo Night, Nord, Gruvbox, Eldritch and Vesper.
- OKLCH tweening: theme changes crossfade without passing through muddy
greys.
- Light and dark switch manually, follow the system, or run on a
daily schedule.
- Cross-app theming (opt-in, per app): Ghostty, GTK 3/4, Qt5/Qt6
(qt5ct/qt6ct), Kvantum, Zed, Fuzzel, btop, kitty, foot, Alacritty,
WezTerm, Helix, Neovim, Vesktop / Vencord, KDE, Cava, tmux, Zellij and
Spicetify colour schemes receive Mandara’s current palette. Apps that watch
their theme files follow it live; Cava, tmux and Spicetify need the reload
steps in the App themes guide. Every app is off until you switch it on in
Studio → Themes → Other apps (or
mandara msg config set
/integrations/gtk4 true): until then Mandara writes nothing outside
~/.config/mandara and ~/.cache/mandara. Switching an app off takes
back exactly what Mandara changed (the import line in gtk.css, the
fuzzel.ini block, the Kvantum link and selection, the theme files it
created) and restores any file it had replaced from its
.mandara-backup; it records what it applied in
~/.config/mandara/generated/app-themes.toml. Compositor border colours
are off by default too (Studio → Compositor). Upgrading from 0.1: if
you never changed the app list, it is now recorded as off and the files
0.1 wrote are left exactly as they are; to keep apps following Mandara,
switch them back on (switching one on and off again also removes what
0.1 added). A list you had changed is kept as you left it. Select them
once: kitty include themes/mandara.conf, foot
include=~/.cache/mandara/themes/foot.ini, Alacritty
general.import = ["~/.cache/mandara/themes/alacritty.toml"], WezTerm
color_scheme = "Mandara", Helix theme = "mandara", Neovim
:colorscheme mandara, KDE Colors → Mandara.
Firefox / Zen (opt-in): ~/.cache/mandara/themes/firefox/colors.json
is pywal-format (point Pywalfox at it, e.g. symlink it to
~/.cache/wal/colors.json if you don’t use pywal) and userChrome.css
there can be @imported from your profile’s chrome/userChrome.css.
See App themes for the additional apps’ activation steps.
- Accessibility & style: high-contrast mode (WCAG AAA text on every
surface), corner roundness, shadows, panel edges, backdrop dim, text
weight and a global animation-speed multiplier.