WeeChat 4.10 adds themes — and finally stops looking wrong on light terminals

WeeChat 4.10.0 landed on 2 August, and the headline is one of those features that sounds cosmetic until you have been bitten by it.

WeeChat now has themes. There is a /theme command, configuration options carry a themable flag, scripts can register their own via theme_register, and /fset gained a t:themable filter so you can see exactly what a theme is allowed to touch.

The part that matters to newcomers: a built-in "light" theme, applied automatically on first start on light-background terminals. WeeChat's defaults have always assumed a dark terminal, which meant anyone running a light colour scheme got a first-run experience of grey-on-white text they could barely read — and no obvious way to fix it short of learning the colour options. That particular bad first impression is now gone.

The rest of the release is unglamorous and welcome:

• /upgrade is much faster with a lot of buffers and lines — the operation you run to restart WeeChat without dropping your connections.
• Faster display of long words in the chat area.
• GET /api/scripts added to the relay API, and a new relay.network.unix_socket_permissions option.
• Alt+= now runs /mute by default when toggling filters.

If you are upgrading from anywhere below 4.9.5, note that you are also picking up three security fixes, two of which reach ordinary users rather than just relay operators. That is the actual reason to do this today; the themes are the reason you will enjoy it.

Download: weechat.org/download — full notes in the 4.10.0 release.