Open Orchestrator

Appearance

Open Orchestrator's UI ships with multiple color palettes and picks the right one for your terminal automatically. It detects whether your terminal background is dark or light, and whether your terminal supports true color or only 16 ANSI colors, then selects a matching palette so the UI always stays readable.

Palettes ​

There are four palettes:

PaletteUse
darkTrue-color dark backgrounds
lightTrue-color light backgrounds
dark-ansi16-color dark fallback for limited terminals
light-ansi16-color light fallback for limited terminals

The ANSI palettes exist so the UI degrades gracefully on terminals that do not support true color, while still respecting whether the background is dark or light.

Auto-Detection ​

By default, the UI auto-detects your terminal background using the OSC 11 escape sequence. If OSC 11 detection is unavailable, it falls back to the $COLORFGBG environment variable. From the detected background it chooses between the dark and light palettes.

The --theme Flag ​

You can override detection and select a palette explicitly with --theme:

bash
owt --theme auto         # default, OSC 11 detection
owt --theme dark
owt --theme light-ansi

--theme auto is the default and uses OSC 11 detection. Passing a specific palette name forces that palette regardless of what the terminal reports.

Overriding the Detected Background ​

If OSC 11 detection fails -- for example on a terminal that does not respond to the query -- you can tell Open Orchestrator the background hex directly with the OWT_BACKGROUND environment variable:

bash
export OWT_BACKGROUND="#1a1a2e"

This overrides the detected hex and lets the UI choose the correct palette even when automatic detection cannot read the background.

Instant Palette Swaps ​

The UI's CSS uses native Textual $variable references rather than hardcoded colors. Because every styled element points at a palette variable, swapping palettes is instant -- changing the active palette updates every element at once with no rebuild or reload.

See Also ​