Add color/theme customization for CLI UI elements

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Mar 15, 2026 by tuncay Closed Mar 15, 2026

Problem

Claude Code's interactive UI elements (yes/no prompts, selection highlights, permission dialogs) use hardcoded 24-bit RGB colors via true color escape sequences. These colors bypass the terminal's 16-color ANSI palette entirely, so users cannot adjust them through their terminal theme.

This is an accessibility issue for users with color vision deficiencies. For example, with slight red/green color weakness, the blue highlight on selected options in yes/no prompts is difficult to distinguish from unselected options.

Evidence

  • Setting ANSI palette colors 4 (blue) and 12 (bright blue) to completely different colors (hot pink, green) in a Ghostty terminal theme has zero effect on Claude Code's UI blues.
  • The same palette changes correctly affect other terminal programs (ls, git, etc.) that use standard ANSI colors.
  • ghostty +show-config confirms the terminal is loading the custom palette values.
  • The Claude Code binary contains hardcoded rgb(R,G,B) values that get emitted as \x1B[48;2;R;G;Bm sequences.

Requested Feature

A way to customize Claude Code's UI colors — any of these would work:

  1. Use ANSI palette colors instead of hardcoded RGB for UI elements, so terminal themes can control them
  2. A config option (e.g., claude config set theme.selectionBackground "#RRGGBB")
  3. A high-contrast mode flag for users with color vision deficiencies
  4. An environment variable to override the color scheme

Environment

  • Claude Code 2.1.76
  • Terminal: Ghostty (true color supported)
  • OS: Arch Linux

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