Appearance & i18n — Suwu Docs

Opening Settings

Click the gear icon in the header to open the settings panel. The tabs are Notifications, Background, Header, Language, Spaces, Actions, and Account. Every preference is stored per browser, so a second device keeps its own.

Font Settings

Font family — choose from system fonts or web fonts. Defaults to Inconsolata for terminals.
Font size — adjust from 10px to 24px. The setting applies to all terminal tiles.
Line height — fine-tune spacing between lines.

# Via environment variable
SUWU_FONT_SIZE=14 suwu serve

# Font family
SUWU_FONT_FAMILY="Fira Code" suwu serve

Theme

Suwu includes several built-in themes:

Light — clean, bright theme (default).
Dark — easy on the eyes for night coding.
Solarized Light / Dark — the classic Solarized palette.
Dracula — popular dark theme with vibrant colors.
Custom — define your own color palette.

Glass Alpha

Control the transparency of the tile backgrounds:

0% — fully opaque solid background.
50% — semi-transparent, shows the background canvas.
100% — fully transparent (glass effect).

Adjust with the slider in settings, or via environment variable:

# 30% transparency
SUWU_GLASS_ALPHA=0.3 suwu serve

Tip

The glass alpha setting interacts with your desktop wallpaper. A subtle alpha (0.1–0.3) gives depth without sacrificing readability.

Background

The Background tab chooses the full-viewport background behind your tiles, with a live preview. Options range from the default Ambient Blob to a looping video clip and GPU-rendered shader backgrounds, each with its own parameters — and you can drop your own into ~/.suwu/background/webgpu/.

See Backgrounds for the full list, the video clip library, writing your own, and performance and fallback notes.

Header Position

The Header tab decides which edge of the window the app bar lives on:

Top (default) and Bottom — the familiar horizontal bar.
Left and Right — a narrow vertical strip. The brand label reads at 90° while every icon stays upright, and the space and split menus open inward instead of downward.

On the side docks the navigation group (spaces, splits) sits at the bottom of the strip and the menu and account controls at the top, and the notification panel anchors to the opposite side so it never covers the bar. A left rail is a good fit on a wide monitor; the top bar stays comfortable on a laptop.

Language

Suwu supports English and Chinese (Simplified) out of the box. The interface detects your browser's language preference automatically.

To force a language:

# Force English
SUWU_LANG=en suwu serve

# Force Chinese
SUWU_LANG=zh suwu serve

You can also switch languages from the Language tab in the settings panel — the change takes effect immediately.

Your Name and Avatar

The Account tab covers how you appear on the login screen, where there is no password field to look at — just a name and a picture.

User name — shown under your avatar. Press Random name to be given one, or type your own.
Avatar source — a built-in avatar, a Gravatar derived from an email address, or an image you upload.
Built-in avatars — a small set of animals and objects ships with Suwu. Leaving the source on From user name keeps the avatar in sync with the name; picking a picture pins it.
Gravatar — fetched from gravatar.com using the MD5 hash of the email. The address itself never leaves your browser.
Upload — downscaled to 512 px and kept in this browser's local storage. It is never uploaded to the server.

If the chosen source has nothing to show, or the image cannot be loaded, Suwu falls back to a built-in avatar rather than an empty frame.

Custom Themes

Create a custom theme by defining color tokens:

# In ~/.config/suwu/theme.json
{
  "name": "My Theme",
  "colors": {
    "background": "#1a1b26",
    "foreground": "#c0caf5",
    "cursor": "#c0caf5",
    "black": "#15161e",
    "red": "#f7768e",
    "green": "#9ece6a",
    "yellow": "#e0af68",
    "blue": "#7aa2f7",
    "magenta": "#bb9af7",
    "cyan": "#7dcfff",
    "white": "#a9b1d6"
  }
}

Place the file at ~/.config/suwu/theme.json and it will appear in the theme selector.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Window-manager and session shortcuts are all Alt-based. Press Alt+Shift+/ in the browser for the searchable shortcut list, which always reflects the running build; Tiling Window Manager has the full table.