atriumatrium

Appearance

Terminal and editor fonts, UI scale, densities.

atrium has three orthogonal appearance layers: themes (colors), fonts (terminal and editor independently), and UI scale (everything else).

UI scale

The app-wide UI scale multiplies every chrome dimension — padding, gaps, icon sizes, borders, radii. It does not scale terminal or editor content (those have their own font settings).

  • Settings → Appearance → UI scale — slider from ~85% to ~150%.
  • Keyboard shortcuts Cmd+= / Cmd+- / Cmd+0 step zoom in / out / reset.
  • Persisted as uiScale in app state; applied across all workspaces.
  • Components use scaledPx() for React inline styles and var(--ui-scale) for CSS, so custom themes and third-party components inherit the scale automatically.
  • Scaled surfaces include the launcher overlay (with the xxs tile size), the markdown editor (both the prose layer and the contenteditable font-size), every modal (launch dialogs, confirms, scaffold modals, dictation overlay), the Library / Vault layout, the tab close button, and the per-row chrome of the skills and profile dialogs. Modals also grow with the window via clamp(min, Xvw, max) instead of staying pegged at hardcoded widths.
atrium does not use CSS zoom or inverse-zoom on the mosaic. If you come from an older version that did, the UI scale value migrates; hand-edited zoom rules in custom themes should be removed.

Terminal font

Applies to every terminal pane. Under Settings → Terminal:

  • Font family — a dropdown of detected monospace fonts. The system is scanned with font-kit on launch and known monospace families are cached.
  • Font size (default 11).
  • Line height — multiplier on the font size.
  • Letter spacing — additional horizontal padding per glyph.
  • Font ligatures — toggle.
  • Cursor style — block / underline / bar.
  • Cursor blink — toggle.
  • Scrollback lines — how many lines of history xterm retains.
  • Padding — pixel padding inside the terminal pane.
  • Background opacity — 0.0 to 1.0.
All values live under config.terminal in config.json.

Markdown editor font

Applies to panes opened in the markdown editor (both RTE and source mode). Under Settings → General → Markdown editor:

  • Default font — any installed font family, not only monospace.
  • Font size (default 14).
  • Text alignment — left / center / right / justify.
  • Book view — fixed-width centered column for long-form writing, with configurable width and side margin.
Stored under config.markdown_editor.

Monaco (editor pane) font

Uses the terminal font family by default, so code looks consistent across editor and terminal panes. Override the editor font independently with the Monaco editor settings in Settings → Editor (falls back to the terminal settings if not overridden).

Activity sidebar density

Changes how much per-card detail the sidebar shows.

  • Full — status + last event + progress + tool call summary.
  • Semi — status badge and last event time.
  • Compact — status dot and adapter accent only.
  • Ultra-compact — the tightest rows, fitting the most agents on screen.
Set under Settings → Activity → Density. Stored per-workspace.

Toolbar and sidebars

atrium has two sidebars — one on each side of the mosaic — and each side independently mounts one of five modes (Workspaces, Overview, Skills & Agents, Activity, Timeline). The mode selector is a row of icon buttons in the header (collapsed-rail equivalent is a single-icon dropdown).

  • Cmd+B — toggle the left sidebar collapsed state, regardless of which mode is mounted there.
  • Cmd+Shift+A — toggle the right sidebar collapsed state.
  • Cmd+Shift+Y — toggle the toolbar (the row of pane-type tiles you can drag to create panes).
  • Cmd+Shift+ — toggle zen mode, which hides all chrome and shows only the mosaic.
Picking a mode that's already mounted on the other side atomically swaps the two, so you can't end up with the same view on both sides.

Tab layout diagrams

Every room strip shows a miniature color-coded diagram of that room's pane layout. The diagram reflects split orientation and pane-type accent colors — notepad amber, diff-review teal, browser blue, git red, editor neutral — so you can identify "the room with a split between the browser and the editor" at a glance.

Live theme switching

Switching themes from Settings → Theme, atrium theme switch <name>, or the system light/dark trigger now applies to the running app immediately — no reload required. Every pane reads from the shared CSS custom properties, so the swap flows through chrome, panes, sketches, and overlays in one tick.

Wallpaper

Set a full-window background behind the mosaic. When a wallpaper is active, panes and chrome go translucent, frosted-glass so the image shows through a single layer per surface — git diffs, sidebar items, activity cards, kanban boards, composers, and the title-bar toolbar all composite over it rather than painting opaque panels.

Supported sources:

  • Image (PNG, JPG, …) or animated GIF.
  • Video (mp4, webm, mov) — rendered as a hardware-decoded <video>, so it animates smoothly at a fraction of the CPU a CPU-decoded GIF would cost. Prefer a short looping video over a heavy GIF.

Pane lights

An opt-in visual layer that wraps adapter panes in an activity-reactive glow, color-coded per adapter, so a busy pane visibly lights up. The motion is weather-like — traveling wavefronts and volumetric depth that react to each pane's activity. Lights only animate for on-screen panes, so the effect stays cheap.

Enable it under Settings → Activity. It's off by default.