safe-design

One token set, many render targets — the SAFE fleet's shared design layer.

from safe_design import GROVE, Skin
from safe_design.backends import css, textual

textual.color("degraded")        # '#ffaf00'
css.resolve("degraded")          # '#ffaf00'   — same token, same color, by construction
css.emit_skin(GROVE, selector=":root")

Why it exists

The palette was already right. It lived in grove/theme.py, which imported curses at module scope — so grove/theme_textual.py had to reach across a module boundary for a private name (from grove.theme import _C) and pay for a terminal library to read a dict of integers. Nothing outside Grove could import it at all.

So twenty-one other terminal UIs in safe-app-store re-derived it by hand, and the fleet's own tui-design skill lists "hardcoded colors clashing with user themes" as pitfall #1 while story-timeline/app.py carries sixty of them.

Tokens do not import render engines. Render engines import tokens.

Layout

Parity is structural

Both the Textual and CSS backends resolve a token through the same xterm256(). They cannot disagree, because neither one converts. test_css_and_textual_agree_on_every_token exists to catch anyone who breaks that.

Tokens

Base palette lifted verbatim from grove/theme.py: bg, input_bg, border, primary, secondary, accent, unread, online, idle, busy, healthy, degraded, down.

SCDS1 §0.4 asks the contract for grant / deny / warn / meter-fill. Three of those already existed under health names, so they are aliases, not new colors:

grant -> healthy    deny -> down    warn -> degraded    meter_fill -> accent

Aliases resolve at lookup, never at definition. A skin that repaints healthy moves grant with it. Setting an alias directly is refused:

GROVE.derive("bbs", grant=10)
# ValueError: skin 'bbs' overrides alias tokens: ['grant'].
#             Override the canonical token instead (grant -> healthy).

Skins

A skin fills the contract; it never extends it. Every token resolves in every skin, so a consumer can rely on --color-warn existing forever.

bbs = GROVE.derive("bbs", bg=0, primary=15, accent=14, healthy=10, down=9)
css.emit_skin(bbs)          # [data-skin="bbs"] { --color-bg: #000000; ... }
GROVE.ascii()               # same colors, +-| chrome, for TERM=dumb

Agent identity colors

Hash-derived and stable. The same agent gets the same color forever, and no one assigns it.

textual.agent_color("willow")   # '#87ff87'
textual.agent_color("hanuman")  # '#5fffff'

Tests

python3 -m pytest tests/ -q