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fix(ui): soften secondary borders - #127

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tecandrew merged 2 commits into
catppuccin:mainfrom
danilo-leal:fix-border-variant
Sep 7, 2026
Merged

tecandrew merged 2 commits into
catppuccin:mainfrom
danilo-leal:fix-border-variant

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@danilo-leal

@danilo-leal danilo-leal commented Nov 16, 2025 •

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Hey all, I'm one of Zed's designers and Catpuccin is our most downloaded theme ever, and the second most downloaded extension; awesome work all around. However, there has been an ongoing problem with it and that's the border.variant token. It just looks way too bright in all theme variants when it's actually supposed to be a less emphasized border color than its sibling border. I've had many user reports thinking that was a bug due to how certain elements end up emphasized, so I thought I'd open this PR to fix it. I used the same colors in both the "mauve" and "no italics" variants, too.

Here's a preview — you can see mainly how the border below the toolbar looks properly darker and de-emphasized:

Frappé Light Macchiato Mocha
frappe light macchiato mocha

The actual colors were achieved by tweaking the lightness and saturation of the previous colors, maintaining the hue.

@latin-1

latin-1 commented Dec 28, 2025

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I believe you should update zed.tera instead. Both json files are generated from that template.

@tecandrew tecandrew changed the title fix: Refine the border.variant color token across all themes fix(ui): soften secondary borders Sep 7, 2026
@tecandrew

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Updated the PR branch so the fix lives in zed.tera and survives regeneration. The shared rule mixes a small amount of the selected accent into the base color, replacing the hand-picked values and covering every flavor and accent.

This differs quite a bit from the bright accent-colored border appearance in the VS Code Catppuccin comparison. That difference is intentional: Zed uses border.variant for de-emphasized dividers. Focused and selected borders retain their existing colors.

Verified the generated files with Whiskers, checked all 112 theme variants, and visually checked extension-card borders in all four flavors plus the blue accent in Zed 1.18.1. The toolbar divider is also subdued after rebuilding the dev extension.

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3 participants