Theme Skill

How colors, typography, and the overall visual design are managed via Material-UI (MUI) theming.

Layout

packages/theme/src/
    ├── index.ts            (package entry, re-exports)
    ├── createMuiTheme.ts   (MUI theme factory)
    ├── palette.ts          (dark & light color definitions)
    ├── typography.ts       (font families & sizes)
    └── components/         (MUI component overrides)

Core Files

Treat palette.ts / typography.ts as the source of truth for exact token values (hex codes, font sizes). Read them directly rather than hardcoding specific values elsewhere.

Color Scheme

Lichtblick supports two schemes: dark (default) and light. Each is defined as a palette object (mode, primary, secondary, error, warning, info, success, background, text, …) in palette.ts.

How a Color Scheme is Applied

1. User sets a preference (AppConfiguration colorScheme setting)
2. ThemeProvider reads the preference from context
3. createMuiTheme(colorScheme) is called with "dark" or "light"
4. MUI's ThemeProvider wraps the entire app with the resulting theme

function createMuiTheme(colorScheme: "dark" | "light"): Theme {
  const palette = colorScheme === "dark" ? darkPalette : lightPalette;
  return createTheme({ palette, typography, components: { /* MUI overrides */ } });
}

Typography

• Inter — primary UI font (variable weight)
• IBM Plex Mono — code/data display (timestamps, topic names, raw messages)

The scale (h1, h2, body1, body2, …) is defined in typography.ts.

Styling Convention (tss-react/mui)

Components are styled with tss-react/mui — not @emotion/styled, MUI's styled(), Box, or the sx prop. Styles live in ComponentName.style.ts files.

import { makeStyles } from "tss-react/mui";

const useStyles = makeStyles()((theme) => ({
  root: {
    backgroundColor: theme.palette.background.paper,
    color: theme.palette.text.primary,
    fontFamily: theme.typography.fontFamily,
  },
  highlight: { color: theme.palette.primary.main },
}));

Skills Reference

• For panel-level colorScheme delivery in RenderState: load panel-extension-api skill