Sophon Docs
Command Line

Themes & AppearanceNEW

Switch CLI color themes, auto-detect light/dark terminals, and run without color.

The Sophon CLI ships with four hand-tuned color themes plus an automatic monochrome mode. Themes shape the brand accents, syntax highlighting, and diff colors used across panels, tables, and the interactive chat REPL.

Themed visuals are part of the default experience — no opt-in needed. If you opt out of the enhanced UI with SOPHON_CLI_V2=0 (or "v2": false in ~/.sophon/config/cli.json), output falls back to plain console styling. See Configuration & Auth.

The themes

ThemeBest for
indigo-coreThe default — balanced indigo accents on a dark terminal
deep-voidOLED / true-black terminals; deeper surfaces, brighter brand
graphiteA muted, low-saturation look for long sessions
daylightLight terminals; darker text and accents tuned for white backgrounds
no-colorAutomatic monochrome — no ANSI colors at all

Setting a theme

Choose a theme with the SOPHON_THEME environment variable:

SOPHON_THEME=deep-void sophon chat

To apply it to every session, export the variable from your shell profile (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or your PowerShell $PROFILE):

export SOPHON_THEME=deep-void

Force monochrome output for any reason (logging, pipes, accessibility) with the standard NO_COLOR convention:

NO_COLOR=1 sophon status

Automatic detection

When you don't set a theme explicitly, the CLI picks one for you. Resolution happens in priority order:

  1. NO_COLOR — if set (to any value), the monochrome theme wins and all color is stripped.
  2. SOPHON_THEME — an explicit theme name (indigo-core, deep-void, graphite, daylight).
  3. Terminal background probe — if your terminal reports a light background (via COLORFGBG), the CLI selects daylight automatically.
  4. indigo-core — the default fallback when nothing else applies.

So a light-background terminal that exports COLORFGBG gets readable colors out of the box, and a piped or NO_COLOR environment stays clean — without any configuration.

COLORFGBG is set by many terminal emulators (e.g. some xterm builds, rxvt). If yours doesn't report it, export SOPHON_THEME=daylight from your shell profile.

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