Guide

Themes

Seven built-in palettes, three of them monochromatic. Pick one and octoscope repaints instantly — no restart.

Set a theme on the command line, in the config file, or cycle through them live in the settings panel:

$ octoscope --theme phosphor    # 80s green CRT

Preview them without guessing

--theme list prints every palette with a colour swatch and exits — so you can pick one in the terminal you'll actually run in:

Output of octoscope --theme list: the seven palettes, each with a colour swatch, three tagged monochromatic

terminal is the special one: instead of fixed colours it borrows your emulator's own ANSI palette, so octoscope shifts to match your iTerm / Ghostty / Alacritty theme automatically.

The octopus that keeps you company on the launch screen follows the theme too, and so does the smaller one that stays beside the dashboard's banner: body in the accent, eyes and periscope lens in the value colour, so an accent override recolours them. The monochromatic themes — and NO_COLOR, which forces one — draw them as a one-colour silhouette.

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octoscope honours NO_COLOR and --no-color: both force the zero-chroma monochrome palette for that run, without touching the theme saved in your config.

Just the accent

Keep a theme but override its accent colour — hex or an ANSI-256 index — from the config file or the settings panel (,):

# ~/.config/octoscope/config.toml
accent_color = "#00F0F0"