Themes
Loach ships two themes, three colour modes and three font sizes, all in Settings → Appearance. Everything updates instantly - no reload - and your choice is remembered across launches. Out of the box you get Aurora in dark mode at the Normal font size.
Themes
Each Theme tile shows a miniature of the app in your current colour mode.
- Solid - calm flat background, azure accent. The pick if you want minimal visual noise.
- Aurora - the default: a soft, blurred mesh gradient under translucent glass panels, with a warm orange accent. The right pick if you like a bit more atmosphere. It leans on GPU compositing; if it flickers, see Troubleshooting.
Colour modes
Independent of the theme, Color mode offers:
- Light
- System - follows your OS preference and switches automatically when you do.
- Dark - the default.
You can also switch from the message box: type /theme light, /theme dark or /theme system (see Slash commands). Private Chat keeps its own dark look whichever mode you pick.
Font size
Pick Small, Normal or Large. The choice is applied as a scale to rem-based and pixel-based text sizes alike, so headings, body copy and chrome stay in proportion. Normal sits a touch below the usual 16 px default; Small and Large bracket it. Native dialogs such as file pickers follow your OS scale instead - see Troubleshooting.
Reduced motion
If your OS is set to reduce motion, Loach follows it: spinners, pulses, the drop-zone glow and the open and close transitions of menus and dialogs stop animating, and smooth scrolling becomes an instant jump.
Window chrome
On Windows and Linux, Loach uses a borderless window. Its own title bar carries the sidebar toggle, the search box, the Private Chat button and Loach’s own window controls (minimise, maximise, close) on the right, so you do not lose any controls by going borderless. On macOS the same bar keeps the system’s own close, minimise and full-screen buttons at its left end instead, and macOS hides them in full screen. Drag the title bar to move the window and double-click it to maximise. The window can’t be made smaller than 900 × 600 px.
Below 1080 px the left sidebar folds itself to an icon rail whenever a right-hand panel (the code canvas or the parameters panel) opens, and unfolds when the panel closes. Ctrl + Shift + S toggles it by hand at any width. See the sidebar on narrow windows.