The Theme panel styles every segment at once. It never adds or removes segments: you can change the whole look of your status line in a few clicks and keep what it shows. Open Theme on the right of Statusline Studio.
Try a quick style
Quick style restyles everything in one click and leaves your segments and palette as they are. There are ten:
| Quick style | The look |
|---|---|
| Rails | Thin bars between segments, icons on |
| Quiet | Small dots, no icons, thin bars |
| Airy | Wide spaces instead of separators |
| Bracketed | Every segment in square brackets |
| Chevron | Bold, with chevrons between segments |
| Powerline | Arrow-shaped chips (needs a Nerd Font) |
| Ticker | Triangles, bold, no icons |
| Slash | Slashes, plain ASCII bars |
| Dense | Pipes and no extra space, for narrow panes |
| Pill | Every segment between thin bars |
Click through them with your own segments. It is the fastest way to find a direction, and you fine-tune from there.
Pick a palette
Palette is the set of colours every segment's colour role comes from. There are 12: Terracotta, Dracula, Nord, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox, Catppuccin, Solarized, Rosé Pine, Monochrome, Synthwave, Matrix and Amber CRT.
Pick the one that matches your terminal theme. If your terminal is Nord, a Nord status line looks like it belongs there.
Set separators, brackets and spacing
- Separator is the character between segments: a bar, a pipe, a dot, a small dot, a dash, a slash, an arrow, a chevron, a star, a triangle, a space, nothing, or the powerline arrow
- Wrap draws brackets around every segment: square, round, angle, curly, or thin bars on both sides
- Spacing sets the gap around separators and the padding inside each segment
- Line prefix draws characters at the start of the second line onward, like
└─, to connect the lines visually
Choose one icon set for everything
Icons gives every segment an icon from the same set:
- None: no icons at all
- Text: plain symbols, one column wide, safe in every terminal
- Emoji: colour emoji, two columns each
- Nerd Font: Nerd Font glyphs
- Mixed: each segment's own default icon
If you then change one icon by hand in the segment editor, the panel says the set is now your own mix.
Get Nerd Fonts right
Nerd Font icons and the powerline look need a Nerd Font installed on your machine and chosen in your terminal's settings. Without it your terminal shows boxes or question marks.
The preview is different: it carries its own copy of the Nerd Font icons and the powerline arrows, so they show in any font you pick, even with no Nerd Font installed. A Nerd Font you have installed still takes over, so the preview matches your terminal.
The Font setting in the studio changes only the preview. Claude Code uses your terminal's font. Pick Nerd Font (auto-detect), or type the exact name your system lists, like JetBrainsMono Nerd Font. The line under it says where the icons come from: your Nerd Font, or the preview's own copy, with a reminder that your terminal still needs a Nerd Font.
Check the details
The small switches at the bottom affect every segment:
- Icons turns all icons off or on without losing your choices
- Bold makes every value bold
- Dim separators draws separators in a muted colour, so the values stand out
- 24-bit colour uses exact colours. Turn it off if your terminal shows wrong or no colours; the script then uses the 256-colour set every terminal knows
The Plain ASCII template shows the safest combination: no icons and no Unicode, for old terminals and remote sessions.
The next lesson is about layout: more than one line, content pinned to the right edge, columns and a box.