Themes

The REPL look is normal or a disguise. It changes rendering only. Prompts, responses, and logs stay the same. The other REPL behaviors stay on REPL features.

Picking a theme

/theme <name> (or --theme <name>, or KDEPS_THEME=<name>) changes the REPL's entire look - banner, prompt, the text you type, model name, streamed responses, thinking blocks, tool summaries. normal is the bright default; every other theme is a disguise that no longer reads as "an AI session on model X" to anyone glancing at your screen in a cafe, on a plane, or in an open office. There is no separate on/off flag - picking a theme takes effect immediately.

The /model picker, the /settings picker, and the startup resume picker (--resume/session history) run outside the REPL's own text rendering, in their own full-screen views - but they pick up the exact same theme colors (accent, success, warning, dim, bold), not just a muted/bright toggle. Switching to vim recolors those pickers with vim's yellow/green/red accents; switching to black collapses them to the same flat gray as everything else.

kdeps --theme black             # start disguised

/theme              show the current theme and the list of valid names
/theme list         same as bare /theme - built-in and custom names shown separately
/theme vim          switch themes - normal, black, linux, vim, emacs, or a custom name

Theme	Look
normal (default)	The bright default palette - no disguise
black	A single flat, legible dark gray (#767676) for every element - muted and monochrome, but readable, not near-invisible
linux	Plain, monochrome-ish light-gray-on-black, like a default terminal with no syntax highlighting
vim	vim's classic default colorscheme conventions (yellow keywords, cyan identifiers, red strings) and a : command-line prompt
emacs	A common terminal-Emacs highlight set (purple keywords, blue functions, salmon strings) and an M-x prompt

Precedence

/theme <name> writes theme: <name> to ~/.kdeps/agent-loop-settings.yaml, so the next kdeps starts with it too. Precedence: --theme flag, then KDEPS_THEME, then the persisted setting, then normal.

Model name

Every theme but normal renders the model-name color at full legibility, so the literal model name is shortened to initials in the status line by default - claude-sonnet-5 becomes CS5, llama3.2:1b becomes L21 - hidden by content, not color. Override this with /model name:

/model name              show the current mode
/model name show         always show the literal model name, regardless of theme
/model name hide         omit the model name from the modeline entirely
/model name abbreviate   always abbreviate, even under normal
/model name auto         back to the theme-based default (the factory setting)

/model name <mode> persists to ~/.kdeps/agent-loop-settings.yaml the same way /theme does.

The spinner

The spinner that appears while waiting for a response never carries a descriptive word in any theme - no "generating," no "thinking" - just the animated glyph and the token counter.

Context-path status line

Directly above the session counter, whenever the running model's context window is known, a line shows what this turn's prompt is made of:

[turn 12.4k/200k | sys 8.1k | mem 1.2k | hist 2.4k | bash_exec 700]
[session sent 1.2m | generated 30 | total 1.2m | this turn +47.2k sent +400 generated]

turn A/B is this prompt's size over the model's context window. The groups after it are that same prompt, split: sys system prompt, mem memory, hist conversation history, goal the active task, and one entry per tool name. Repeated calls to the same tool add to that one number. Past 5 groups the oldest collapse into +N. The line resets with each new prompt.

The session row

The session row is cumulative and is never measured against the window; only turn is. sent is the running total of prompt tokens handed to the model this session, generated is the running total the model wrote back, and total is their sum (everything spent this session, which is why it can exceed the window). this turn is the sent/generated delta since your last message; it appears once the turn has spent anything and resets on the next message. History is sent again on every round, so sent grows faster than one turn's window and is not "how full the context is". generated is the running total of tokens the model wrote back, including reasoning. Both move while a reply is still streaming and while a tool is running; they are not stuck at 0 until the call finishes. /compact and /fold replace both with the context that remains: sent is that context, generated is the model-written part still in it. web, sh, file, and src appear beside them only after a call in that budget, as used/limit. The turn line and this counter are one frame: each tick rewrites those rows in place.

The turn figure

The turn figure is the prompt size the model actually received on its most recent call: the provider-reported count when the backend returns one, otherwise the size of the messages sent. The per-part numbers (sys, mem, hist, tools) are estimates taken before the call, so they are scaled to add up to that total, and anything they do not cover (your message, tool schemas, framing) shows as other. Before the first call of a turn the parts are shown as plain estimates. The modeline used/limit shows the same figure against the same window, in the same decimal format (20.7k/128.0k).

Custom themes

Every theme - built-in or not - is a YAML file. Drop your own into ~/.kdeps/themes/<name>.yaml and it shows up in /theme's list immediately:

# ~/.kdeps/themes/solarized.yaml
name: solarized     # optional - defaults to the filename without its extension
prompt: "$ "         # the literal prompt text this theme renders
bold: true
palette:
  heading: "#b58900"
  text: "#839496"
  # any field you omit falls back to the "normal" theme's value, so a
  # custom theme can override just a couple of accent colors and leave
  # everything else alone

A custom theme can reuse a built-in's name (e.g. your own vim.yaml) to override it. An invalid color value in one field is dropped with a warning; the rest of the file still loads.

Every palette: field is optional; the full set is heading, link, code, codeBlock, text, thinking, muted, bullet, quote, borderHr, synKeyword, synFunc, synStr, synComment, synNum, synType, synOp, replError, replMeta, replHeading, replSuccess, replPrompt, replInfo, replDim, bannerText, bannerBorder, modelsReady, modelsNoKey, modelsCurrent, and modelName (the model name shown in the status line).