Recognize the Window Without Reading the Title
A family terminal has to be findable from across the room. That is not a branding exercise. It is how you do not click into the wrong glass when four windows are open and one of them is still iTerm. Smolder puts identity in the chrome: a SMOLDER wordmark, an ash title bar, an ember rail under the title bar and tab strip, an ember cursor. The ash is #191412. The ember is #FF7A3C. Those two values are the face. They do not need a theme store to exist, and they must not leak into the grid that programs draw in.
Content colors stay standard. htop, lazygit, vim, a TUI that assumed a normal sixteen-color palette — they get to keep that assumption. A terminal that repaints the world orange will fight every one of those programs, and the fight will be scored as a reach for iTerm. Identity and content live on different layers on purpose. Chrome says which app. The grid says what the job is printing.
The Ember Is a Pointer, Not a Theme
The ember rail is chrome under the title bar, not a per-pane marker. Inactive panes dim so you do not have to hunt. The ember cursor marks where input will go, which matters more once a phone can watch without typing. Neither is a license to recolor ANSI. A focused pane that inverts the whole TUI is a focused pane that just broke the operator's map of the program they were in. Focus is a chrome fact: dimming the inactive panes, maybe a thicker divider or a word in the title. Not a second rail on the leaf. It is not a new LS_COLORS.
The wordmark is the same kind of fact. It sits in chrome so a glance is enough. Hiding it to gain two rows of grid is how every terminal ends up looking like every other terminal, and then you are back to reading titles. Two rows are not the bar. Absence of a reach is the bar. If the window cannot be recognized, the bar is already collecting a dated row: opened the other app because this one disappeared into the wallpaper.
No Theme Store, On Purpose
Track 1 already refused a plugin market and a theme store. This lesson is that refusal at the pixel layer. A theme store is how someone else's multiplexer comes back wearing a prettier palette. It is also how content colors drift until a TUI is unreadable and the operator blames the TUI. Smolder's look is a small, named set of chrome choices. Operators can still configure the emulator — font, scrollback, Option as Meta, the standard palette the core already offers — without Smolder pretending to be a skinning engine.
The phone will wear the same ember. Same wordmark energy, same rail idea, adapted to a compact chrome. That is Track 5's universal app, not a second brand. If iOS grew a different orange, you would have two faces for one fire, and across-the-room recognition would fail in a pocket. Chrome is identity. Content is the job. Keep them from dyeing each other.