Themes & Customization

PhanTerm pursues ultimate consistency and comfort in its visual design. All interface components are rendered under a unified color palette.

Default Theme & Palette

PhanTerm globally utilizes a fine-tuned dark theme palette (Tokyo Night style). This ensures that the file tree sidebar, terminal emulator, status bar, and all floating overlays maintain extreme color consistency at all times. Moreover, this color scheme is specifically optimized for high-contrast code reading and eye comfort during extended use.

Powerline Status Bar

The status bar at the bottom of the application provides rich environmental context:

• Displays your current Operation Mode (e.g., NORMAL or TERMINAL) in real-time.
• Indicates the currently focused UI panel and overlay status.
• Tracks and displays the working directory path of the current remote terminal, if available.
• The far right intelligently displays context-sensitive shortcut hints (prompts are kept short and action-oriented).

By default, the status bar uses modern Powerline arrow symbols (such as  and ) as separators.

Tip

Font Recommendation: To achieve flawless symbol rendering in the terminal emulator, we strongly recommend installing and configuring a Nerd Font (like Hack Nerd Font or any other fully-patched Nerd Font) for your host terminal environment (e.g., Windows Terminal, iTerm2, Alacritty).

If your current font lacks these symbols, you can disable them by setting the environment variable PHANTERM_POWERLINE=0. The UI will gracefully degrade to standard separators.

Responsive Layouts

When your terminal window is narrow (under 60 columns wide), PhanTerm’s status bar automatically degrades to a compact mode. This ensures that even when placing windows side-by-side, you still receive critical prompts without confusing line wraps.