huebox

A terminal theme editor with live preview.

huebox shows you the colours your terminal is actually using, and lets you change them from a keyboard-driven interface — no hex codes, no hand-editing, no restarting.

  huebox              TUI when stdout is a terminal, static preview otherwise
  huebox edit [name]  force the interactive editor (a theme if named)
  huebox show [name]  force the static preview (of a theme if named)
  huebox --dump [name]  print the resolved colours and exit
  huebox --formats    list supported formats
  huebox new <name>   create a theme from your terminal (or a built-in ramp)
  huebox list         list your themes, current one marked
  huebox use <name>   make a theme current and push it to your terminal
  huebox import <name>  snapshot the detected terminal into a theme

Modifiers: --to ghostty,kitty picks push targets, --no-push writes the theme file only, --no-reload skips the terminal reload, --ghostty-in-place edits a Ghostty config instead of exporting a theme, --force overwrites on new / import, --from <fmt> and --config / --format override detection.

Install

uv tool install huebox   # or: pip install --user huebox

The command lands in ~/.local/bin. If your shell cannot find huebox afterwards, add that directory to your PATH (e.g. at the end of ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc) and reload the shell:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

To use it in the terminal you already have open, reload the config instead of restarting it:

source ~/.bashrc

Beyond the stdlib it needs Pygments (the code sample) and Textual (the editor), both installed automatically.

Themes

~/.config/huebox is the truth: one file per theme in themes/<name>.toml, plus state.toml naming the one you are working on. A terminal config is a push target, not the place your theme lives.

huebox import dusk            # snapshot this terminal into a theme
huebox edit dusk              # edit it; every Ctrl+S saves and pushes
huebox use dusk               # switch to it and push, no editor
huebox use dusk --to ghostty,kitty   # push to specific terminals
huebox use dusk --no-push             # switch without touching a config

huebox edit with no name opens the current theme; huebox show <name> and huebox --dump <name> read a theme file instead of a config. With no theme library at all, huebox edit edits the terminal config in place.

Editing

Run huebox edit and drive it with the keyboard.

The mouse works too: click a swatch to select it, a picker row to open it, wheel through long picker lists. Clicking anything else does nothing.

Edits live in an in-memory buffer — nothing is written until Ctrl+S — and the whole frame renders from that buffer, so palette, code sample and examples are live before the file changes (a tall frame also shows a git diff of the sample). The header names what you are editing (ember ● for a theme, ● marks unsaved changes); t opens the picker without leaving the editor, and opening a theme with unsaved edits is refused rather than losing them. Ctrl+S writes the theme file first, then pushes to your terminal and asks it to re-read its config (--no-reload turns that off), so the colours are live when the command finishes.

A config is only ever edited line by line: a colour it does not define is reported (not carried by this config: …) and left alone — huebox never invents a line in your terminal's config.

Ghostty themes

When your Ghostty config is organised by theme (a theme = line), a save writes the theme under its own name to ~/.config/ghostty/themes/ and moves that one line — saving dusk never rewrites another theme's file. With inline colours (or a config-file include) huebox edits the file in place instead. --ghostty-native forces the export, --ghostty-in-place forces the edit; a theme = line pointing at a missing file is repaired by writing it.

Supported terminals

Paths follow XDG_CONFIG_HOME when set; the search order is each terminal's own. huebox only offers a terminal whose config actually holds colours. Override detection with --format, or point at a file with --config (one push target only):

huebox edit --format kitty
huebox use ember --to ghostty --config ~/dotfiles/ghostty/config

Safety

Writes are line-level: only the colour tokens are replaced, so comments, ordering, alignment and every unrelated setting survive untouched. A save that changes nothing does not write the file at all — its mtime is untouched too. The only file huebox writes outside your terminal config is its own ~/.config/huebox library.

Development

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests

License

MIT