The application no longer knows what it looks like. It imports one stylesheet and
mounts one provider; every colour, surface and radius lives in `src/workspaces/theme`.
Proven both directions, because either alone would be worthless:
Duck renders IDENTICALLY to before — checked against screenshots taken before
anything was touched, not asserted.
Plain renders as white with black ink, no component edits — panels turn white, the
teal avatar turns black, the grid fills vanish.
── What moved ──
`globals.css` held three unrelated things: Tailwind wiring, the token contract, and
the Duck brand's hex values. Split along those seams. `base.css` is structure and
names no colour; a theme file is values and nothing else, scoped to
`[data-theme='<id>']`. Adding a theme is a CSS file plus one registry line.
Light and dark are separate themes rather than a mode — the owner's call, and it
removes a concept from the app. Each is written out in full: a theme that only makes
sense as a diff against another cannot be authored by a stranger or sold to a
customer. `.dark` survives only as a per-theme flag, because 396 `dark:` utilities in
33 components resolve against it; retiring those retires the flag.
The `duck-*` utility names are kept for now and pointed at neutral variables, so a
non-Duck theme can define them sensibly. Renaming 1,470 occurrences in the same commit
as the extraction would make any visual difference impossible to attribute. Worth
recording that `duck-dark` was never a brand colour — `#14532d` in light, near-white
in dark, used by 946 components to mean "text". It is `--ink` now.
Surfaces are complete CSS values rather than HSL triplets: `--panel-bg` has to be able
to be a gradient or an image, or the glass the app already has would be unthemeable.
The old provider is a re-export, so its six call sites are untouched and the
extraction stays one variable.
── Bug found by the Plain theme ──
`useThemeSync` stamped the server's `appearance.colorMode` over the local theme on
every load, so choosing Plain and reloading silently reverted it. Diagnosed by asking
the page what it was wearing rather than reasoning: `stored` said `duck-dark` when the
script had written `plain`. The server value is now a starting point for a browser
that has never chosen, not a continuous instruction.
── Tools ──
Two, both of which lied to me before they worked. The snapshot script photographed
light twice and called it a clean run (one browser context, accumulated init scripts);
it now warns when a light/dark pair is identical. The preview server returned the
shell for missing assets, so the logo and wallpaper vanished and read as regressions
in the comparison — it falls through to upstream now.
Dead Tailwind v3 residue deleted: `components/ui/tailwind.{config.ts,css}`, referenced
by nothing, with content globs pointing at a directory that does not exist.
── Not done, deliberately ──
`THEMES-NOTES.md` has the full list. The headlines: the reference repo has not been
read, so the switching mechanism is deliberately the dumbest thing that works; the
wallpaper, panel radius and logo are still component-owned and Plain proves it; and
~985 raw Tailwind palette usages remain, worst in Soulseek.
tsgo clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
