Look and feel

The screen is laid out the way a Borland IDE laid one out, and for the same reasons:

Part	What it is
Menu bar	Grey, along the top, with the clock in the corner. Esc, Alt+letter, or a click.
Desktop	The shaded blue field the windows sit on (character ░, as Turbo Vision used).
Panes	Framed windows: double-line and a yellow caption for the pane with the keyboard, single and grey for the other. The path is the caption, what is tagged (or under the cursor) is the footer, and the scrollbar rides the right-hand frame.
Listing	Directories white, symlinks cyan, tagged files yellow, the cursor a cyan bar.
Dialogs	Grey, double-framed, ╡ captioned ╞, with red accelerators, blue input fields, green buttons with their own shadow, and a drop shadow two columns right and one row down.
Key bar	Grey, along the bottom, the F-keys and what they do.

meridian_commander/theme.py holds the whole palette: the sixteen EGA colours, a table of roles (“what colour is a dialog button”), and the drawing primitives — frames, shadows, scrollbars, hot-key captions — that everything else is built from. Three things follow from having it in one place:

• Schemes. turbo is Turbo C++ 3.0; midnight keeps the chrome and puts it on black; mono is the monochrome adapter. Switch with Options ▸ Colours (it is remembered in config.ini, [ui] scheme).

• No colour, no problem. Every role carries a monochrome fallback, so a terminal with no colour — or one that has run out of colour pairs — still gets the shape of the screen: which strip is chrome, which row is the bar.

• ASCII frames when the encoding needs them. The box-drawing characters are used when the locale can encode them and +-| when it cannot. Set MERIDIAN_ASCII=1 to force the plain set on a terminal that claims UTF-8 and then draws it badly.