Decent Colors for pi.dev on a Bare Linux VT
pi.dev is a terminal-based coding agent, similar in spirit to Claude Code but minimal by design: a handful of tools, an editable system prompt, and a theme system with 51 color tokens covering the UI, markdown rendering, syntax highlighting, tool diffs, and thinking-level indicators.
The theme system assumes a truecolor terminal. Its own documentation is explicit about this: colors are defined as 24-bit RGB hex values, with a fallback to the 256-color xterm palette for older terminals. The list of terminals it mentions is iTerm2, Kitty, WezTerm, Windows Terminal, and VS Code.
A raw Linux virtual terminal - the console you get on tty1–tty6 without X or a terminal emulator running on top - is not in that list, and is not supported. There is no framebuffer console fallback anywhere in the theming code.
pi.dev using the vt8 theme below. Nothing fancy, but readable.
Why the default themes break on...
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