Themes

Happier ships 18 built-in themes and lets you build your own from any of them. Colours carry everywhere the app draws — surfaces, text, controls, diffs, syntax highlighting, the embedded editors, and the native system chrome around the window — so a theme is not just the chat background.

Find them under Settings → Appearance.

Built-in themes

The presets cover the usual dark and light families plus several ports of editor themes people already use: Crisp, Pitch, Sunset, Night, Graphite and Classic on the dark side, Crisp and Paper on the light side, and Tokyo Night, One Dark Pro, Monokai Pro, GitHub Dark and Light, Dark Modern, and the four Catppuccin flavours.

Built-in themes are read-only. To change one, clone it — the clone is yours to edit and the original stays intact.

Making your own

A custom theme starts from a preset, so you are adjusting a coherent palette rather than assembling one from nothing. From there you can override individual colour tokens, grouped by what they affect rather than by variable name.

Two things worth knowing while editing:

• The preview is a live sandbox. It shows surfaces, text, controls, state colours and syntax together, so you can judge a change against the parts of the app you do not currently have open.
• Changing the preset replaces your draft colours. Happier asks first, because unsaved edits are discarded when the starting point changes.

A theme also declares whether it uses light or dark app assets, which is what keeps icons and images legible against the palette you chose.

Moving themes around

Export a theme to JSON and import it on another device, or share it. The export is versioned, so a file made today keeps working as the token set grows.

Import also accepts VS Code themes, which is usually the fastest way to make Happier match the editor you already stare at all day. Imports are validated rather than trusted: a malformed file is rejected with a reason instead of producing a half-applied palette.

Loading indicator

The spinner that shows while an agent works has its own picker under Settings → Appearance → Loading Indicator. Eleven styles draw the H of Happier in dots and move light through it in different ways: Wave (the default), Handwritten, Build and Release, Relay, Twin Stems, Slow Breath, Starfield, Sweep, Radar, Ripple and Aurora. Classic Ring keeps the original rotating ring. Each option in the picker is a live preview.

Two more choices sit under the picker. Speed (Slow, Normal or Fast) sets how quickly the light moves through the dots. Pause (None, Short or Long) sets how long the dots rest before each loop starts again; Short is the default. The pause stays the same length at every speed. Styles that loop without resting, such as Slow Breath, Starfield, Radar and Aurora, ignore the pause, and the Classic Ring keeps its own pace, so the settings that do not apply are greyed out with a note saying why. The previews play at your chosen speed and pause.

Spinners follow your theme's text colour. Aurora uses the theme's indigo, purple and orange accents instead, except on tinted surfaces such as a filled button, where it falls back to that surface's colour so it stays readable.

With your system's Reduce Motion setting on, no light travels across the indicator: the dots hold still and fade gently in and out, and the Classic Ring stops turning. These choices are saved per device.

Limits

Related

• App — the rest of the client's appearance settings.
• Keyboard shortcuts