The sidebar used to be a flat pine slab. The background used to be a dot grid nobody could see. Both got rebuilt.
Sidebar accents
Ten 165° three-stop gradients: Forest (default), Midnight, Bordeaux, Amethyst, Onyx, Champagne, Espresso, Lagoon, Rose Noir and Slate. Every palette is a muted Pantone-adjacent pick — deep, cinematic mids, restrained highlights. A matching radial glow in the bottom-right corner keeps long sidebars from reading as a banded block.
Background patterns
Ten SVG tile motifs — concentric rings (Arcane), hex mesh, graph paper, diamonds, topographic contours, vesica piscis (sacred geometry), sparse Morse dots, crosshair pluses, herringbone weave, and a plain no-pattern option. Everything is drawn in the Tacitus pine colour on light mode and in mint on dark mode at ~10–15% opacity so the motif reads as an engraved watermark rather than a hashmark wall.
Top-bar pastel tint
The header above the inbox no longer ships pure white. It reads
a --header-tint CSS variable set by whichever sidebar
theme is active — so pick Bordeaux and the header subtly shifts to
a pale rose, pick Champagne and it goes pale cream, etc. In dark
mode it collapses to slate #1e293b like every other
surface.
Go to Settings → Preferences and scroll down to
pick yours. Selection lives in localStorage and is
applied before first paint, so there's no flash when navigating
between pages.