Appearance
Colour palette, light and dark, and typography.
Bristlenose's interface can be recoloured, switched between light and dark, and — on the Mac — retyped. These all live in one place: Settings → Appearance. Focus Mode, at the foot of this page, is a reading state you turn on and off as you work rather than a setting.
Colour palette
Choose the palette the report and interface are drawn in:
- Default — matches your Mac's system colours.
- Edo — a warm palette of washi-paper backgrounds and Prussian-blue ink, drawn from Edo-period Japanese prints.
macOS app
Open Settings (⌘,), go to the Appearance tab, and pick a palette under Colour palette.
Command line
Pass --palette when you serve a report:
bristlenose serve --palette edo
Or open Settings in the report itself and choose under Colour palette. You can also set BRISTLENOSE_PALETTE=edo.
Light and dark
The interface follows your system's light or dark setting by default. To fix it one way:
macOS app
In Settings → Appearance, set Application appearance to Light or Dark — or leave it on Use system appearance.
Switching recolours the report in place: your position on the page, the lens you are on and the panels you have open all survive the change.
Command line
Set BRISTLENOSE_COLOR_SCHEME to light, dark, or auto:
export BRISTLENOSE_COLOR_SCHEME=dark
Typography (macOS app)
The Mac app draws the interface in SF Pro, the system typeface, so it sits naturally alongside native windows. To use the same Inter typeface as the web report instead, switch Typography in Settings → Appearance. In your browser the report always uses Inter.
Unlike the appearance switch above, changing Typography — or the interface language — rebuilds the report, which returns you to the top of it.
Focus Mode
When you are reading quotes rather than working on them, Focus Mode recesses everything that isn't the quote. Tag chips, sentiment badges, timecodes, context lines and the card outline itself fade to a faint trace, as do section and theme descriptions along with their titles; the quote text and the speaker code stay at full strength.
macOS app
Press z on the Quotes lens, or use View → Focus Mode (⌘⌥F). Both are unavailable on the other lenses.
Command line
Press z while the Quotes lens is open.
Four things worth knowing:
- Nothing moves. Focus changes only colour and opacity, never layout, so the quote you are reading stays exactly where it is. A card may show a blank band where its chips were — that is the price of never reflowing, and it is deliberate.
- Your stars recede too. The line down the left edge of a starred quote fades with everything else; the star itself and the quote's heavier text carry the mark instead. Starred is a plural state — a bar that reads well against one card reads as noise down twenty of them. Printing from Focus Mode keeps the edge, since a page you have printed is no longer a page you are reading through.
- Receding is resting, not disabled. Hover a faded chip, tab to it, or open a tag input with
tand it returns to full strength. You can star, tag and hide without leaving the mode — which is the point, since reading undistracted is usually what you do in order to triage. In dark mode the keyboard cursor picks up a thin accent ring, because Focus drops the card you are on to the page colour — the same colour every faded card around it already has. - It is not a theme. Focus works in light, dark, Default and Edo alike, and leaves your palette untouched. It fades over about a third of a second, or switches instantly if you have asked your system to reduce motion.
Setting the interface language lives in the same tab — see Languages.