ghostty-yazi-flavor

Generate a yazi flavor from your active Ghostty theme — so yazi's hover bars, mode pills, and code-preview syntax highlighting actually match your terminal instead of fighting it.

Why

Yazi's default theme follows your terminal's 16-color ANSI palette, which gets you most of the way — but two things don't follow it:

1. Code-preview highlighting uses syntect's built-in default theme, which ignores your palette entirely. On most themes that means a wall of mismatched color over the wrong background.
2. Hover indicators use reverse-video: the hovered row becomes a solid block of its own text color. If your theme keeps something loud in its blue slot, every hover is a neon bar.

Hand-made flavors fix this for popular themes (catppuccin, dracula, …). For the other ~450 themes Ghostty ships with — or your own custom one — this tool generates the flavor from whatever theme is actually active.

How it works

It runs ghostty +show-config, which prints the resolved config with the active theme's palette already applied (built-in themes, custom themes in ~/.config/ghostty/themes, includes — all handled by Ghostty itself). From those 16 colors + background/foreground/selection it writes:

~/.config/yazi/flavors/ghostty.yazi/
├── flavor.toml    # hover bars, mode pills, tabs, borders — palette-derived
└── tmtheme.xml    # code-preview highlighting built from your actual colors

The flavor is deliberately partial: everything yazi's preset already gets right by following ANSI colors is left alone; only the spots that ignore the palette (or follow it badly) are overridden.

Install

uv tool install ghostty-yazi-flavor
# or: pipx install ghostty-yazi-flavor

Then point yazi at the flavor in ~/.config/yazi/theme.toml:

[flavor]
dark = "ghostty"
light = "ghostty"

Use

ghostty-yazi-flavor                    # regenerate from the current theme
ghostty-yazi-flavor status             # what's generated, is the watcher on

Change your Ghostty theme → run it again → restart yazi. The full grammar is generate (the default; takes --out <dir> and --ghostty <path>), install-watcher [--print], uninstall-watcher, and status.

Automatic regeneration

ghostty-yazi-flavor install-watcher    # set it and forget it

Installs a file watcher on your Ghostty config (and custom themes directory, if you have one), so the flavor regenerates on every config write — including saves that you follow with Ghostty's reload-config keybinding:

• macOS: a launchd LaunchAgent using WatchPaths — event-driven, no polling, no dependencies. Logs to ~/Library/Logs/ghostty-yazi-flavor.log.
• Linux: systemd user units (a .path watching the config + a oneshot .service).

--print shows exactly what would be installed without touching anything; ghostty-yazi-flavor uninstall-watcher removes it cleanly.

Non-systemd Linux: run a watch loop under your supervisor of choice (supervisord, runit, …):

inotifywait -m -e close_write ~/.config/ghostty/config | while read -r _; do
  ghostty-yazi-flavor
done

chezmoi: if your Ghostty config is managed there, skip the watcher and hook regeneration to the source of truth instead:

# .chezmoiscripts/run_onchange_after_sync-yazi-flavor.sh.tmpl
#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
# ghostty config hash: {{ include "dot_config/ghostty/config" | sha256sum }}
"$HOME/.local/bin/ghostty-yazi-flavor"

tmux note

If yazi renders colorless inside tmux, the pane environment is missing COLORTERM. Add to your tmux.conf:

set -ga update-environment COLORTERM

License

MIT