Appearance
Mel's look: the theme, fonts, and how blocks and tabs render.
Mel ships one deliberate look: a neutral, near-black dark theme with a single teal accent. There's no theme gallery today — instead, the appearance settings tune density, zoom, and how blocks render.
The theme
- Neutral grayscale surfaces — a near-black background with slightly lighter cards, hovers, and selections. No colored chrome competing with your output.
- Teal accent — Mel's one brand color, used sparingly: the active-pane marker, selection highlights, active filter toggles, matched characters in the command palette.
- ANSI colors are sacred — your tools' own colors are parsed from the raw output and preserved exactly; Mel never restyles command output. See Blocks.
Type
Terminal output, the prompt input, and agent responses all render in monospace — conversations read like part of the terminal, not a chat app grafted on. A true bold face is registered for titles and headings, and a system symbol font backs glyphs like ⇧, ⌥, and ✓ so shortcut chips render on every platform.
Settings → Appearance
Open Settings from the titlebar and pick Appearance:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Zoom | UI scale, as a percentage dropdown |
| Show block dividers | The thin hairline between consecutive blocks |
| Compact block header | Folds the directory + time into the command row; the selected block keeps the full header |
| Dim inactive panes | Reduces brightness of panes without focus in a split |
Changes apply immediately and persist in ~/.mel/settings.json — a plain JSON file you can edit or check in; see Settings files.
Elsewhere in settings
A few appearance-adjacent switches live on other pages: Show input hints (ghost autocomplete and hint text under inputs) is under AI settings — see Autocomplete — and the sidebar row density and content are in the rail's own gear popup, covered in Tab customization.
Related
- Blocks — dividers, selection cards, headers
- Split panes — where dimming inactive panes applies