Desktop App (Mac): User messages displayed in dark blue on black – poor readability

<img width="674" height="487" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c7fd3e75-1b46-4608-85e7-00d4811d6964" />

Same issue here on Windows with the new update from yesterday. Claude chat side of things look fine, claude code side looks terrible and is borderline unreadable

Claude Code
<img width="388" height="131" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/28c94fd4-2f8c-4655-8e21-31b08c47d63a" />

Claude Chat looks great

<img width="754" height="183" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d46e9c37-67a9-47f4-95e5-5054cbfce04a" />

It's also worth noting that my Windows client all of a sudden thinks I'm on a Mac and it giving me Command+enter buttons rather than ctrl+enter.

Same issue on Linux, confirmed on both VA panel and OLED displays. VA is a little worse but they are both awful. You need to use a brighter blue on a dark background.

This isn't a monitor quality issue, I'm on a high-end display, I'm not at all color blind, and my vision is excellent. The color choice is just wrong for dark backgrounds regardless of panel type.

This isn't all text though, it's text highlighting in code where I'm seeing the dark blue on some things. The regular text is gray or white and it's fine. I know I can turn off code highlighting entirely but I like code highlighting.

Yeah, I really don't like the Claude Code color scheme on the Mac desktop app. It's nothing like anything I've seen using the CLI or VS Code extension, nothing like the Claude.ai (Chat and Cowork) colors and it's jarring and difficult to read. Not only the blue, but the black background that the entire window changes to for Code (as opposed to the deep brown that is in the rest of the app) is ... well ... again, jarring. Chat and Cowork are one consistent set of colors, and Code is completely different.

If nothing else I'd most welcome the color scheme for Code just being consistent with Chat and Cowork. Maybe the thinking is to have different color schemes so there can be no doubt which mode you're in but then why have Chat and Cowork the same, and only Code different.

I think:
Option 1: Simples option: Just make Code the same as Chat and Cowork, and call it done. Don't see any reason to have Code different to the other two, unless there's an option for all three to be different.

Option 2: Surely a few simple color choices alongside the others in "Settings > General > Appearance" would work well?

I'd like to propose:

• Keep the overall Window and other UI elements' colors as the anthropic defaults (ie. what they currently look like in Chat and Cowork).
• Then for each of light and dark modes, a color picker for:
• Claude's messages background color
• User messages background color

If you're willing, then you could go a little further with either or both of:

• color pickers for message text colors in each case (in addition to message backgrounds).
• multiply it all by three, and we can choose those each independently for Chat, Cowork and Code if we want...

Or if you really don't want to build a UI for this, no worries - can we have any of this as part of Claude's settings.json or similar?

But all that said, I for one would be fine with Option 1.

PS. Is there any under the hood way to tweak any of this (eg. any json/plist/other file somewhere that already has any of this)?

I got the Blue text on Black background today. It is killing my eye and making the UI unusable.

Today’s update looks to have slightly addressed this. The background is no longer black, matching the rest of the modes in the desktop app. However it still doesn’t seem to be back to the way it was before this regression.

Closing for now — inactive for too long. Please open a new issue if this is still relevant.

It's still relevant. We are just waiting for it to be fixed. How many times do you want us to open the same issue.

Closing for now — inactive for too long. Please open a new issue if this is still relevant.

You need to re-open it.

This issue has been automatically locked since it was closed and has not had any activity for 7 days. If you're experiencing a similar issue, please file a new issue and reference this one if it's relevant.