Eldritch is a community-driven dark theme inspired by Lovecraftian horror. With tones from the dark abyss and an emphasis on green and blue, it caters to those who appreciate the darker side of life.

Main Theme repo can be found here

Showcase

🦑 Cthulhu (Default)

🌀 Abyss (Darker)

🌅 Dusk (Light)

Installation

lich installs a theme repository from its URL — nothing to download or copy by hand:

1. Open lich and go to Settings → Appearance.
2. Next to Theme, click Import.
3. Paste https://github.com/lichdotdev/eldritch-lich and click Install.
4. Pick a variant in the theme picker. The terminal picker defaults to Match app, so one pick dresses the interface and the terminal panes alike — or choose a different variant there if you want them to differ.

Later releases are taken with Update on the theme's row.

Variants

Theme	Upstream palette	id	scheme
Eldritch	🦑 Cthulhu	eldritch	dark
Eldritch Abyss	🌀 Abyss	eldritch-abyss	dark
Eldritch Dusk	🌅 Dusk	eldritch-dusk	light

How the palette maps

The upstream color specification names four background rungs; lich's surface tokens take them as an elevation ladder, so the chrome stays dark instead of drifting to mid-grey:

Eldritch	lich
background	background — the app ground
currentline	card, popover, sidebar — tabs, footer, dock, menus, dialogs
surface	accent, secondary, muted, border — hover and selected fills, hairlines
overlay	input — control edges
comment	muted-foreground — secondary text, paths, resting icons
green	primary — the one high-emphasis fill, per the spec's focus / active role
red	destructive
green	tone-pass: "passed" in the status line
yellow	tone-wait: "waiting on you"
cyan	ring — the focus ring; kept off primary so a focused green button still shows one

Dusk shifts the ladder one rung down (currentline is the canvas, background is the chrome), the way lich's own light theme mirrors the depth of its dark one.

The terminal palettes follow the upstream Alacritty port, which carries all three variants.

Dusk legibility notes

Neon on near-white is a losing fight, so the light variant swaps a few slots for their darker siblings from the Abyss palette — same family, readable at body size:

• black / brightBlack are dark (#1e2029, #5b5c66) rather than near-white, or every dim TUI line would vanish into the background.
• terminal red, green and cyan take the Abyss values; destructive takes the Abyss red for the same reason.
• ring is purple, which the spec prescribes for Dusk text roles where green and cyan are decorative only.
• tone-pass (#1a744a) and tone-wait (#995500) are the Eldritch green and orange with their lightness lowered. The status line sets them at 12px, where WCAG asks 4.5:1, and the upstream values read 1.66:1 and 1.45:1 on Dusk's light canvas. Hue and saturation are untouched; Cthulhu and Abyss take the upstream values as they are.

Thanks to

• omartelo — port author
• Eldritch contributors — original palette

Contributing

Each variant is one lich theme file — eldritch.json, eldritch-abyss.json, eldritch-dusk.json — beside the lich-theme.json manifest that carries the pack's version. There is no generator: colors are edited directly in the theme files.

To propose a tweak:

1. Fork the repo.
2. Edit the relevant variant file.
3. Validate the whole directory — a repository installs all or nothing: node validate.mjs . (ships with the lich theme skill).
4. Bump version in lich-theme.json in the same commit. An unbumped version ships nothing: Update compares only that number.
5. Open a PR.

Palette reference: eldritch-theme/eldritch.

License

MIT