Theming

Aconite is fully themeable at runtime: one shared palette drives every color on the face, so recoloring live-recolors the whole instrument. A theme is a small set of tokens: neutral chrome, a per-module accent, and a master tint, plus the color rules that drive the frequency and lane visualizations. You can build your own theme from scratch (or edit any of the bundled ones) live in the theme editor, step through around 40 curated themes in the browser, save and load your themes as .labtheme files to share or collect, and the active theme travels with the patch and the saved project. The default look is “Ultraviolet”, Aconite’s signature deep-violet theme.

How colors are organized

Rather than a flat list of color picker for every pixel, Aconite organizes its color system into three layers. Change one layer and everything it governs updates at once:

Chrome is the shared furniture: the neutral palette that applies to card backgrounds and borders, section labels, value readouts, dividers, knob tracks, waveform displays, grids, the on-screen keyboard keys, and scrollbars. Chrome colors define the overall “temperature” of the interface: whether it reads warm, cool, dark, or light.

Per-module accents give each section of the instrument a distinct signature color. The oscillators, the filters, the envelopes, the effects: each has its own accent, so at a glance you always know which module you are working in. Knobs with multiple rings color those rings as stepped brightness variations of their module’s accent. You can adjust each module’s accent individually in the theme editor.

Master tint is one set of Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders that shift all the module accents together at once, while keeping them distinct from one another. Dragging the Hue slider re-skins every module in one move, giving you a completely different mood without losing the per-module contrast.

Frequency and lane colors

Two kinds of visualization use color to carry meaning, and each theme controls both.

Frequency displays (the filter response graph and the noise spectrum) encode pitch as brightness. Each theme takes a single hue (drawn from the filter accent) and ramps it from deep and saturated at the bass end to bright and pale at the treble. Read left to right, lows sit dark and highs glow, so you can see where a filter is working at a glance. It is deliberately a single-hue lightness ramp rather than a rainbow, so pitch reads as one continuous scale instead of a scatter of unrelated colors.

Lane colors (the mixer channels and the step sequencer) instead use a palette of distinct colors, one per lane, so each source keeps its own identifiable color no matter where it sits. Here you can choose between the theme’s own set of colors and a fixed visible-spectrum set, or turn the lane coloring off for a single neutral tone.

Both follow the active theme, so the whole face stays visually coherent as you recolor.

The glass FX screen

The effects display screen can be rendered as a lit glass panel rather than a flat fill, so the readout looks like a small pane of illuminated glass set into the face. This is on by default, so out of the box the screen already reads as lit glass: a soft gradient, a gentle darkening toward the edges, a faint sheen across the top, and a thin beveled rim.

The theme editor gives you a few controls to shape it:

FX Glass (On / Off): turn the glass material on, or switch it off to go back to a plain flat screen. Leave it on for the lit-glass look; turn it off if you prefer a flatter, more utilitarian panel.
Depth (0 to 1): how pronounced the glass looks. This drives the strength of the gradient, the edge shading, the surface sheen, and the beveled rim together. Low values keep it subtle; high values make the pane read as deep, glossy glass.
Grain (0 to 1): a subtle texture across the surface. A little grain keeps the glass from looking perfectly clean and adds a tactile, physical feel; zero leaves the surface smooth.
FX Ink (Inherit / Custom): the color of the text and readouts on the screen. Leave it on Inherit to reuse the theme’s normal value-text color, or switch to Custom and pick a color from the swatch beside it when you want the screen’s text to stand apart from the rest of the readouts.

All four settings are part of the theme, so they save and load with it and travel inside a shared or exported theme the same way the colors do. A theme you hand to someone else arrives with your glass look intact.

Browsing and switching themes

The theme cluster in the header shows the current theme name with < and > steppers. Clicking either arrow walks through the saved themes one at a time, and the whole instrument recolors the instant you step; there is no separate load click. Around 40 curated themes ship with Aconite, spanning dark industrial looks, inverted light panels, and everything between.

The same < / > browser is also available inside the theme editor overlay, so you can step through themes and fine-tune them in the same session: browse until you find something close, then nudge the colors without closing the editor.

The theme editor

For deeper customization, open the theme editor from the < / > cluster or from the Options menu. It opens as a floating overlay on top of the instrument and lets you:

Pick any color token from a swatch grid and edit it in a full color picker.
Drag the master Hue / Saturation / Brightness sliders to shift all module accents at once.
Switch the lane colors between the theme’s own palette and a fixed visible-spectrum set, and enable or disable the lane coloring entirely.
Preview your changes live: the whole synth recolors as you work, not just a small preview card.

When you are happy with a theme, you can save it to a .labtheme file for sharing or archiving. The .labtheme format and the theme embedded in a preset are the same format; they are fully interchangeable. A theme you author in the editor and save as a file can be loaded back into any preset, and a theme carried inside a preset can be exported as a standalone file. You can maintain a personal theme library of .labtheme files and drop whichever one suits a project into any patch.

Themes travel with patches

The active theme is part of your instrument’s state. When you save a preset, the theme is saved with it; when you load that preset, its look is restored along with its sound. A patch you share with someone else will arrive in the same visual context you designed it in.

If you load a preset that was saved without a theme (older patches, for example), Aconite keeps whatever theme you currently have loaded. The default “Ultraviolet” applies only when no theme information is present at all.