Color coding & customization

When you run more than one thing at once, color is the fastest way to keep track. SwarmADE lets you assign a color to each Hive and to each Worker, so parallel work stays visually distinct even when several streams are moving at the same time.

Color per Hive

Every Hive can carry its own brand color. That color follows the Hive through the interface — its tab, its window chrome, and the accents in its panels — so when you have several Hives open you can identify each one instantly without reading labels. Pick a color when you create a Hive, or change it later from the Hive settings.

Color per Worker

Inside a Hive you may have multiple Workers active on a task (a Swarm). Each Worker can also carry a color, which tags its terminal panel, its entries in the Queen timeline, and its lines in the Drone review pane. With distinct colors, a glance tells you which CLI produced which output.

Hive: payments-api   ● teal
  Worker: Claude     ● amber
  Worker: Aider      ● violet
  Worker: Codex      ● blue

What is fixed vs. themeable in the MVP

SwarmADE is dark-first. The MVP ships a single, polished dark theme — the overall look, spacing, and typography are fixed and driven by the design tokens, not editable per user.

What you can customize is the per-Hive and per-Worker color accents described above. Those colors sit on top of the fixed theme; they change how you distinguish entities, not the underlying visual system.

Customization lives in two places: the Pre-flight Wizard when you first create a Hive, and the Hive settings once it exists. Broader theming (light mode, custom palettes) is planned for a later release; for now, lean on color accents to keep parallel work readable.