November 13, 2025/372 words/2 min read

In Praise of Catppuccin

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

I've been using the same color scheme for two years now, which for me is basically a lifetime. I used to cycle constantly through Nord, Gruvbox, Tokyo Night and whatever was trending that week. Nothing ever stuck! I liked Monokai Pro for a while because it looked professional without being boring and the contrast was excellent. 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. I haven't even been tempted to try anything else. The four variants (Latte, Frappé, Macchiato, Mocha) share enough of the palette that switching between them never feels like changing themes. The pastels stay legible without becoming harsh, and I don't have to pay for a Code extension.

The ports are what really sold me on it. I use the same palette in VS Code and Ghostty as I do in Slack, Firefox and Discord. There are hundreds of ports now, including one for seemingly every tool I use.

Here's what each variant looks like.

mocha — palette.toml

~ cat palette.toml

[colors]

rosewater = "#f5e0dc"

flamingo = "#f2cdcd"

pink = "#f5c2e7"

mauve = "#cba6f7"

red = "#f38ba8"

maroon = "#eba0ac"

peach = "#fab387"

yellow = "#f9e2af"

green = "#a6e3a1"

teal = "#94e2d5"

sky = "#89dceb"

sapphire = "#74c7ec"

blue = "#89b4fa"

lavender = "#b4befe"

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.

Opening any app and seeing the same familiar colors is oddly satisfying. My mismatched interfaces finally look like they belong together. It shouldn't matter, but it does. I still switch between light and dark modes depending on the time of day, with Latte in the morning and Mocha by evening. I wish more tools could switch between a theme's light and dark variants with the system. Even most code editors ignore this. VS Code forks don't always bother, though Zed 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. I'm supposed to stop thinking about a color scheme once it works. Catppuccin still weirdly delights me after two years, so it was probably worth one silly post.