Rad Binder

Rad Binder restyles bb with the look of an 80s/90s school binder and Saturday-morning toy commercial, while keeping the conversation itself plain enough to read all day.

What you get

• A binder-spine sidebar. The sidebar is deep purple in both light and dark mode, scattered with faint neon squiggles, triangles, crosses and dots. The selected thread becomes a hot-pink sticker with a teal drop shadow, and section labels are set in bold italic capitals.
• Striped binder edges. A pink, yellow, teal and purple stripe runs across the top of the window and along the top of every inline UI card.
• Chunky controls. The composer, your own messages and inline cards get thick outlines and hard offset shadows. The composer outline turns yellow while you type.
• Toy-ad headings. Headings in replies and cards use a geometric display face in bold italic capitals with a crisp offset shadow.
• Neon diffs and terminal colours. Diffs and file previews use Synthwave '84 in dark mode and Catppuccin Latte in light mode, and the terminal gets a neon ANSI palette.

Light and dark

Dark mode is after-school TV at night: neon on deep purple. Light mode is a lilac binder cover with deep-purple ink. Reply text stays on a plain background in both, with only a faint laser grid near the composer.

Requirements

• bb 0.43 or later.
• The display and body fonts are Futura and Avenir Next, which ship with macOS. On other systems the theme falls back to your system sans-serif.
• No network requests, accounts or API keys. Everything is one stylesheet.

Good to know

Some decoration (the selected-row sticker, message plates and card stripes) targets bb's current markup. A future bb release can drop those touches; the colours and fonts stay.