README.md

Endless

Frank Ocean's Endless as a bb theme family: endless, the achromatic silver print, and endless-color, the same structure with rare pops sampled from the film's painted stair.

Released August 19, 2016. This is the ten-year mark.

Install

bb plugin install git:https://github.com/brsbl/bb-plugins.git@plugin/endless --yes

Use

Activate either palette:

bb theme set plugin:endless:endless          # the silver print
bb theme set plugin:endless:endless-color    # silver + the stair accents

The palette is app-wide and stored server-side; light/dark mode stays a separate per-client setting that each stylesheet layers on top of, so one theme covers both. bb theme reset returns to the default without touching your favicon color.

The family

endless-color is generated from the endless stylesheet plus appended light and dark override blocks in build/build-color.py, and a test asserts that derivation byte-for-byte. Radius, type, the sidebar material and every structural rule are therefore shared by construction — the variant can only differ where it deliberately overrides: the silver field, the stair accents (light blue, mustard, orange, red, olive), the foil violet, and the plywood trim.

The complete generators and reference imagery live in build/, outside the package files allowlist so installed plugins do not carry the authoring sources. build/PROVENANCE.md records each measured colour, its source region, exact value, and nearest pixel in the committed image.

Type across the family follows the album's liner notes: Helvetica for the UI, Courier for code, paths and terminals. Both are system faces — nothing is embedded.

The design

The album is a black-and-white visual record: a grainy near-black field, two silver-gelatin photographs, printers' registration marks in the corners, a greyscale step wedge down each edge, and a warehouse ceiling of fluorescent tubes. Five moves carry that into a UI palette.

Achromatic. There is no accent hue. The neutral ramp is a warm-toned silver print — the step wedge from the cover's edge strips — and every surface, border and text tier is drawn from it.

Light is the accent. In dark mode --primary is pure #ffffff, the fluorescent tube. Body text sits a step below at #f4f1ec, so a primary button or a link reads as literally lit rather than merely tinted. Light mode inverts the idea: --primary becomes #0d0d10, a slab of ink on paper.

Squared. --radius drops to 0. Photographic prints, crop marks and registration targets have no rounded corners.

Two tones, not one. Body text is warm-toned; file paths and the timeline are cold (#9fb8c4). Two prints from the same negative, developed in different chemistry. It is the only temperature shift in the theme, so it does an accent color's job without adding one.

Semantics keep their hue but are toned rather than saturated, like a hand-tinted print: destructive is the darkroom safelight, warning is sepia, success is selenium, merged is a dusty violet. The ANSI terminal palette is deliberately left at bb's defaults — a greyscale remap would erase the one place in the app where color is load-bearing rather than decorative.

Notes for anyone editing the stylesheet

Canvas grain stays off. Earlier builds raised both --canvas anchors to compensate for a page-wide film-grain overlay. The canvas is now the measured field directly. The sidebar keeps a separate paper mottle in light mode and a zero-mean highlight/shadow grain in dark mode, so its texture does not lift the surface away from the contrast value being tested.

Panels sit above the field. In dark mode cards, popovers and code wells sit a step above the canvas rather than below it — the cover's own logic, where the photographs are the lit planes and the black is the surround.

:root beats bb's .dark. They have equal specificity and this sheet loads last, so every token pinned in the light block is pinned again in the dark block. Dropping one leaks its light value into dark mode.

Contrast floors held throughout: text ≥ 4.5:1, non-text UI ≥ 3:1, including the tight cases (the secondary text tiers over the hover fill).

Code colors are not part of this plugin. bb's plugin manifest accepts only { id, name, description, css } per theme — there is no field for a Pierre / VS Code code theme, and the plugin SDK's ThemeArea is read-and-activate only. So bb theme show reports pierre-dark / pierre-light for this palette: diff line colors still follow --diff-added / --diff-removed from the stylesheet, but syntax highlighting inside code blocks uses bb's default hues rather than this theme's toned monochrome. A matching pair exists and works when the palette is installed the other way, as a custom theme folder under <bb-data-dir>/theme/endless/ alongside pierre-dark.json / pierre-light.json.

Fonts are system-native. The family uses Helvetica Neue and Courier with portable fallbacks; it embeds no font files. theme.test.ts fails the build if a machine-specific path appears in either generated stylesheet.

Develop

From the monorepo root:

npm ci
python3 plugins/endless/build/build.py 0.13 0.18 plugins/endless/themes/endless.css local
python3 plugins/endless/build/build-color.py plugins/endless/themes/endless-color.css plugins/endless/themes/endless.css
npm run check --workspace=bb-plugin-endless
bb plugin install "path:$PWD/plugins/endless" --yes