Ask Claude for a theme
Describe a look in words and watch the IDE repaint itself while the answer is still arriving.
A theme is a document, and a model can write one. Press Ask in the save bar and describe what you want.
Asking#
The button opens a small window titled Ask Claude — theme, which floats over the IDE and can be moved anywhere. The placeholder sets the register:
Describe a vibe — “warm paper light”, “deep ocean night”…
Enter sends, Shift+Enter starts a new line. Follow-ups work — "warmer", "more contrast", "same but light" — because the conversation goes along with each request.
It repaints while it writes#
This is the part worth seeing rather than reading about. The answer is not delivered at the end and applied in one jump. As the model writes the document, Semantix parses it and lands each finished value immediately — so the IDE recolours in front of you, piece by piece, while the busy row reads painting live….
Alongside it, the window narrates what it just did, one quiet line per change:
Top bar → gradient
Header → live CSS
Selected / Active → #7dd3fc
Window translucency → 85%
When the model finishes, the complete document is applied once more to reconcile anything the streaming pass missed.
Which model answers#
The dropdown at the bottom of the window is its own setting, separate from the model your chat uses.
Claude Code is selected for you — it's first in the list — and runs against your own local Claude installation. Nothing goes to a Semantix server and no account is needed, but Claude Code has to be installed and logged in on this machine.
Your own models — an OpenAI-compatible endpoint configured in Settings → Models — go through the Semantix service and require you to be signed in.
What it can change#
More than any other single control in the app:
- Every theme colour, including the syntax highlighting colours
- The whole-app wallpaper — the one thing you cannot set by hand anywhere in the editor
- Regional backgrounds for the header, both side panels and the footer
- Window translucency
- Free-hand CSS per section — the slot where animation lives
That last one is deliberate: the agent can write real stylesheets into a section, which is how you get a theme that moves rather than one that merely has colours.
What survives, and what doesn't#
The answer lands as live, unsaved edits — not a draft to accept, and there is no undo button. Press Save in the bar to keep the result as a named theme.
Important
Leaving without saving undoes only part of what an ask did. Your colours, fonts and the wallpaper revert with the rest of the palette. But the regional backgrounds, the section CSS and the window translucency it wrote are kept, because those belong to the layer that saves itself.
To clear the parts that stayed: Reset all in the Sections panel drops the regional backgrounds and the section CSS. It does not reset translucency — if an ask made the window see-through, the only way back is the Window translucency slider in the Global panel, or its reset link.
The safest habit is the same as everywhere else here: Save your look before asking, so reverting is one click on the dropdown.
The conversation itself is temporary. It survives closing the ask window, but leaving the Theme Editor ends it and clears the thread. What it painted stays.
When it fails#
Failures appear as red rows in the conversation, not as silence:
- Asks need a custom model (Settings → Models) or Claude. — the selected model isn't one this can use.
- Signed out — sign in and ask again. — your session expired on the server route.
- An error with a status number — the service or your provider refused; rate limits show up here.
- A message about the answer not being a JSON document — the model replied with prose. Ask again, more plainly.
Two silences worth recognising: the Ask button is greyed out until you've both typed something and got a model, and cancelling says nothing — closing the window or sending a second ask abandons the first without comment.