In Praise of Catppuccin

November 13, 2025 · 428 words · 2 min read

The color scheme that finally made me stop theme-hopping.

Disclaimer. This is a silly post about colors on screens. I know it's silly, but I can't help being excited about it, which is probably the nerdiest thing I'll admit to this week.

I've been using the same color scheme for two years now, which for me is basically a lifetime. I used to change themes constantly, Nord, Gruvbox, Tokyo Night, whatever was trending that week. Nothing ever stuck! I liked Monokai Pro for a while, it had great colors, excellent contrast, it felt professional without being boring to look at. But they wanted money for the Code extension. For a color scheme! I get that design work has value, but something about paying for syntax highlighting just rubbed me the wrong way.

Then I found Catppuccin and stopped looking. Completely stopped, haven't even been tempted to try anything else, it's just that well thought out. Four variants (Latte, Frappé, Macchiato, Mocha) that all feel cohesive, beautiful pastel colors that aren't washed out, good contrast without being harsh, and it's completely free.

But here's where I get really excited. The ports! Catppuccin has themes for everything. VS Code, Ghostty, Slack, Firefox, Discord, literally hundreds of apps. Someone made a port for every tool I use, and they all look consistent. The same purples, the same pinks, the same blues everywhere.

Here's what each variant looks like.

This is the first time I'm using the MDX support I added to the site months ago. Seemed like as good an excuse as any.

There's something satisfying about opening any app and seeing the same familiar colors. It makes everything feel like it belongs to the same system instead of just being a collection of mismatched interfaces. It's visual consistency that shouldn't matter, but it does. I still switch between light and dark modes depending on the time of day, Latte in the morning, Mocha by evening. Same aesthetic, different brightness. I just wish more tools respected system theme preferences and supported paired light/dark colour schemes, even most code editors ignore this. VS Code forks don't always bother, though Zed actually gets it right. I have very specific feelings about which variant belongs when. Dark mode during daytime is a waste of those clean, luminous day colors.

And yes, I know caring this much about hex codes and background colors is absurd. But when a color scheme just works and you stop thinking about it, or in my case think about it constantly because you're weirdly delighted by it, that's worth nerding out over. Even if it's a little bit silly.