Your theme now follows the account instead of living in one browser's localStorage.
Choosing Plain on a laptop reaches the phone.
`appearance.colorMode` is superseded by `appearance.theme`. Along the way this
resolves a mismatch that had been sitting there: the server's default was
`appearance: { theme: 'light' }` while the client read `appearance.colorMode`, so that
default had never once been read by anything. Both sides say `theme` now.
The Light/Dark item is gone from the user menu. Light and dark are two themes, both
already in the list above it, and that toggle was the last writer of the legacy key.
── Two bugs found by testing this, both mine, both silent ──
**A default that looked like a choice.** `useSettings` returns `DEFAULT_SETTINGS`
until the request lands — `settings` is never null, it is a complete valid object. So
"wait for settings" fired on the first render against the defaults, marked itself
done, applied the default theme and never saw the real one. Then the persist side
wrote that default over the account's actual preference. It overwrote the owner's own
`dark` while I was testing it; restored by hand from the `colorMode` it had not yet
destroyed. `useSettings` now exposes `settingsLoaded` so the difference is expressible.
**Defaults masking a migration.** With that fixed, an account holding only
`colorMode: 'dark'` STILL came up light. The client merges `DEFAULT_SETTINGS` over
whatever arrives, so a missing `theme` is filled in with the default before any
consumer sees it — and a default is indistinguishable from a choice. The migration
therefore belongs on the SERVER, which sees the stored object before anything is
merged over it. It is read-only: a GET that rewrites the row on every call is a
surprise, and the client persists on its next change anyway.
Verified by putting the account into the pre-themes shape and asking the new handler
directly, rather than by restarting to find out:
stored: {"colorMode":"dark"} -> returned: {"colorMode":"dark","theme":"duck-dark"}
── Needs a restart ──
The first server-side change in this work. Everything until now was frontend and a
rebuild was enough.
950 pass / 7 fail unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5