Catppuccin for Ghostty: installing the pastel theme in a terminal

Four flavors, and the choice is a taste decision

The repository is a theme package, and the entire design surface is the palette. There are four flavors, each with a preview image in the assets directory: Latte, Frappe, Macchiato and Mocha.

Latte is the light one, and the other three are the dark variants, with the preview images making the difference visible at a glance. This is the familiar Catppuccin structure, where one palette is defined in a light flavor and the rest are dark, and the point of having four rather than one is that the dark variants differ from each other in saturation and contrast rather than being copies.

The repository is under the Catppuccin organization, which is a collection rather than a single project, and the copyright line reads Catppuccin Org 2021-present.

Two details in the file layout tell you how the themes are produced. There is a `ghostty.tera` file, which is a Tera template, so the theme files are generated from a template rather than hand-written, and there is a `renovate.json`, which is the configuration for the Renovate dependency update bot. A `themes/` directory holds the output files themselves, one per flavor.

For a reader deciding whether to use this, the honest summary is that there is no code to read here. The value is the palette, and the value of the palette depends entirely on whether you already like Catppuccin's colors, which is a question no repository can answer for you.

The one-line install points at a theme Ghostty already bundles

The Usage section gives the simplified path first. You set `theme = Catppuccin <flavor>` in your Ghostty configuration file, where `<flavor>` is one of `Latte`, `Frappe`, `Macchiato` or `Mocha`.

Two things about that line are worth noticing. The flavor names are capitalised in the built-in form, and the format uses the theme name and the flavor separated by a space, which is Ghostty's own theme reference syntax rather than a filename. The configuration file is the one described in Ghostty's configuration documentation, linked from the README as the configuration file location, and the same link is used for the configuration directory when the manual instructions refer to it.

The README is also candid about what this form actually gives you. The simplified instructions use the upstream Catppuccin theme bundled into Ghostty, which may differ from the themes provided in this repository.

That sentence changes how you should read the rest of the page. The one-line install is not this repository at all. It is the version Ghostty ships, and this repository exists for the cases where the bundled one is not the one you want, either because it is out of date relative to the palette or because it is simply a different revision of the same colors.

So there are two distinct artifacts here, and the README separates them into a section called Direct/Manually. The first is convenient and needs nothing downloaded. The second is the actual content of this repository.

The manual path copies a file into the themes subdirectory

To install the exact themes from this repository, the instructions are three steps, and the middle one is where the file naming convention lives.

First, download the file for your flavor of choice from the `themes/` directory into the `themes/` subdirectory of your Ghostty configuration directory, which the README gives as `~/.config/ghostty/themes/` on a typical Unix setup.

Second, set `theme = catppuccin-<flavor>.conf` in your Ghostty configuration file, where `<flavor>` is one of `latte`, `frappe`, `macchiato` or `mocha`.

Third, reload or restart Ghostty. The reload is a keyboard shortcut, Cmd+Shift+comma on macOS.

The naming difference between the two forms is the detail that trips people up. The built-in reference is `Catppuccin <flavor>` with a capitalised flavor and a space, while the file-based reference is `catppuccin-<flavor>.conf` in lowercase with a hyphen and a `.conf` extension. They are two different reference forms in Ghostty's configuration, one resolving to a bundled theme by name and the other to a file in your themes directory.

The README also points further configuration at the Ghostty configuration reference, so anything beyond the theme name itself, such as adjusting the palette or the background opacity, is documented by Ghostty rather than here.

Compared with the bundled theme and with a hand-written theme file

There are two other ways to get a colored terminal in Ghostty, and the difference in approach is about who owns the palette definition.

The bundled Catppuccin theme is the zero-effort path. One line in the config, no files to download, and it updates with Ghostty itself, which means the palette is whatever the terminal maintainers decided to ship. The cost is that you do not control the revision. The README states plainly that the bundled theme may differ from the themes in this repository, so if you are matching a specific palette, whether a screenshot, a dotfiles repository, or a colleague's screen, the bundled version may not be the one that matches.

The second option is writing your own theme file. Ghostty's theme format is a plain configuration file, and the `themes/` directory here is a directory of exactly those files. Writing your own means you can pick colors from anywhere rather than accepting a palette, and you can keep it in your own dotfiles repository alongside the rest of your terminal configuration, versioned and portable. The cost is that you are maintaining a file, and that the Catppuccin palette is a set of carefully chosen harmonious values that a hand-picked scheme is unlikely to match without effort.

The repository also credits one person in its thanks section, uncenter.

For a person who likes the Catppuccin palette and wants a specific revision of it, this repository is the narrowest path. For a person who is happy with whatever ships, the built-in line is strictly better, since it has no update step.

A theme package with a small maintenance surface

The maintenance story here is simple, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up.

The repository is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-08-28. There are no GitHub releases attached, so the history of what changed is the commit log rather than a release list. The `renovate.json` file indicates that dependency updates are handled by a bot, which for a repository of generated theme files is close to the whole maintenance story: a template changes, the files are regenerated, and the colors may move.

The consequence for a user is that pinning a version of this theme means pinning a commit, not a tag. If you copy the file into your own configuration directory, you own the copy and nothing upstream will change it. If you leave the file in the themes directory of a dotfiles repository that is synced from somewhere, you are tracking whatever the last update produced.

The licence is MIT, via the Catppuccin organisation's LICENSE file, and the README carries the corresponding badge. That is a permissive licence with no obligations beyond retaining the notice, and this is not legal advice.

The repository also carries a `.editorconfig`, a `docs`-free structure, a `CONTRIBUTING`-free structure, and an `assets/` directory holding the preview images referenced from the README, including the main `assets/preview.webp` and one image per flavor.

For a repository whose whole content is four small configuration files, that is a complete and appropriate footprint. The main thing to be aware of is that a theme has no behaviour to break, so the risk here is purely visual drift, not a broken terminal.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this repository if you want the Catppuccin palette in Ghostty and you would rather pin the exact theme file than track whatever upstream bundles. Do not adopt it if the bundled Catppuccin theme in your Ghostty build already looks right, because the README says the two may differ and the bundled one needs no installation. Verify first that your Ghostty config directory is the one you think it is, since the manual path depends on it, and that the flavor name you set matches the file you copied, since the built-in form uses a capitalised name and the manual form uses a lowercase one.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. catppuccin/ghostty on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: MIT
4. README