Appearance

Appearance decides what the Island, Dock and Banners are made of, how large everything Kanade draws is, and how it settles.

Key	Type	Default	Notes
appearance.tone	dark | light	dark	Selects light or dark for Settings and apps; the shell follows the finish
appearance.finish	tinted-solid | paper | blur	tinted-solid	blur is the tinted solid translucent over what the compositor blurs; needs niri 26.04
appearance.sync	bool	false	Writes wallpaper colors for GTK, qt5ct/qt6ct, KDE apps, niri, kitty and Pywalfox
appearance.accessibility	bool	true	Follows the desktop’s reduced motion and higher contrast preferences
appearance.motion	bouncy | smooth | snappy | playful	bouncy	How the Island and Dock settle
appearance.font	family	unset	Installed family for shell labels; unset uses Inter, then sans-serif
appearance.scale	% 80-200	100	On top of each output’s own scale; a window already open keeps its size
animation.speed	% 25-400	100	Higher is faster; interaction delays and countdowns do not change
reduced_motion	bool	false	The fade is 80 ms at 100% speed; KANADE_REDUCED_MOTION=1 or 0 overrides it

[appearance]
tone = "dark"
finish = "blur"
sync = true
scale = 125

[animation]
speed = 100

At startup Kanade reads the wallpaper awww shows; Matugen derives its light and dark palettes from it and renders the targets configured in ~/.config/matugen/config.toml. Matugen is optional: without it, or on failure, Kanade uses built-in colors.

Note

appearance.sync restarts the GTK portals when GTK settings or colors changed, at most every 30 s; an open file dialog closes, and restarting the GNOME backend drops a running screen share. Running GTK, Qt and KDE apps keep their colors until restarted. Precedence for motion, highest first: KANADE_REDUCED_MOTION, reduced_motion = true, the portal, off.

See also

Wallpapers, niri rules for the blur finish, and Config defaults.