01 AMBER CONSOLE · SYSTEM GUIDE

COLOR

Five discharge intensities over three warm blacks. Every color decision in the system is a choice of intensity, and intensity means energization: bright is live, faint is inert.

THE PALETTES

A palette is not a theme and not a light/dark pair — it is a specific piece of hardware, and naming one takes two attributes on the root element: data-ac-tech is the technology, what is making light at all; data-ac-emitter is which gas, or which phosphor, inside it. An emitter is only meaningful within its technology — neon is a gas and exists only under plasma, p3 is a phosphor and exists only under CRT — so every block is selected by both, and a mismatched pair selects nothing rather than quietly rendering the wrong hardware. Pick one from the two display catalogs on the board at the top of the page; the menu bar carries the readout, not the choice. Both ramps are shown below regardless of which is active, and both are held to the same contrast gate.

PLASMA / NEON · 24° · THE DEFAULT

A monochrome AC plasma panel. The light is neon emitting directly from the gas — no phosphor anywhere in the stack. The hue is derived, not picked: weight the Ne I visible lines by the CIE 1931 observer and the discharge sits at x=0.631 y=0.369, just outside sRGB. That maps to 19°, which is a DC neon tube; a pulsed sustain enriches the 585.2nm line and walks it up. 19–31° is the defensible band and 24° is its middle.

--EMIT-100 · #FFA86DHOT HIGHLIGHT, FOCUS

--EMIT-90 · #FF6B08PRIMARY — --ac-ink, --ac-fill

--EMIT-70 · #DD5800SECONDARY TEXT

--EMIT-50 · #AB4500DIM, DISABLED

--EMIT-30 · #5B2500TRACE, GHOST RULES

--SCREEN · #100600

--SCREEN-RAISED · #1B0C02

--SCREEN-WELL · #060200

--ON-FILL · #1E0C00

CRT / P3 · 38° · THE PHOSPHOR

The classic amber CRT phosphor (P3): a broad ~590nm band with real green content, where neon is a line spectrum with almost none. Historically this is a different display technology — but it is what most people mean by "amber terminal", it is the ramp the source design system was drawn against, and it pairs naturally with .ac-crt.

--EMIT-100 · #FFD052HOT HIGHLIGHT, FOCUS

--EMIT-90 · #FFAE1EPRIMARY — --ac-ink, --ac-fill

--EMIT-70 · #CD8817SECONDARY TEXT

--EMIT-50 · #8D5B10DIM, DISABLED

--EMIT-30 · #4A2F08TRACE, GHOST RULES

--SCREEN · #0D0700

--SCREEN-RAISED · #170E02

--SCREEN-WELL · #060200

--ON-FILL · #1A0E00

PLASMA / HELIUM · PALE PINK

Helium has no low manifold to dominate the way the heavier gases do — its visible lines all fall out of n=3 and n=4 decaying to n=2, at comparable energies, so nothing outranks the rest. The strong yellow at 587.6nm carries the luminance while 447.1nm and 667.8nm pull the result off the blackbody locus toward purple. Integrates to x=0.3944 y=0.2986: a near-white with a pink cast, which is what a helium tube is.

--EMIT-100 · #FFA2B9HOT HIGHLIGHT, FOCUS

--EMIT-90 · #DC7D96PRIMARY — --ac-ink, --ac-fill

--EMIT-70 · #BC6A80SECONDARY TEXT

--EMIT-50 · #925163DIM, DISABLED

--EMIT-30 · #502A34TRACE, GHOST RULES

--SCREEN · #0E0809

--SCREEN-RAISED · #1B1214

--SCREEN-WELL · #060404

--ON-FILL · #201216

PLASMA / ARGON · PALE VIOLET-LAVENDER

Argon puts most of its power into the 696–772nm array, where the CIE observer scores under 0.01 — which is why argon is dim, and why its 696.5nm peak is the strongest line but not the color. What you see is the 415–475nm group, a hundred times weaker on the meter and a hundred times better placed for the eye. x=0.2163 y=0.1047, desaturated 35% toward D65 to fit sRGB: paler here than in the tube.

--EMIT-100 · #C9B0FFHOT HIGHLIGHT, FOCUS

--EMIT-90 · #AF81FFPRIMARY — --ac-ink, --ac-fill

--EMIT-70 · #9F5DFFSECONDARY TEXT

--EMIT-50 · #8925F1DIM, DISABLED

--EMIT-30 · #4B1088TRACE, GHOST RULES

--SCREEN · #0B0812

--SCREEN-RAISED · #171222

--SCREEN-WELL · #050309

--ON-FILL · #1B112C

PLASMA / KRYPTON · PALE VIOLET-WHITE

A blue-violet cluster at 427–450nm against the 557.0nm green and the 587.1nm yellow. Spread that wide integrates close to white — x=0.3153 y=0.2551 — which is why the panel reads violet rather than any one of those lines. The strongest visible krypton line is 587.1nm, not the 557.0nm that is often quoted.

--EMIT-100 · #EAA5EBHOT HIGHLIGHT, FOCUS

--EMIT-90 · #BF86C0PRIMARY — --ac-ink, --ac-fill

--EMIT-70 · #A372A3SECONDARY TEXT

--EMIT-50 · #7F587FDIM, DISABLED

--EMIT-30 · #442E45TRACE, GHOST RULES

--SCREEN · #0B080B

--SCREEN-RAISED · #181318

--SCREEN-WELL · #050405

--ON-FILL · #1B141B

The ramp is --ac-emit-100 through --ac-emit-30. It used to be --amber-*, which named a hue rather than a ramp and was already only historically true — under NEON the color is not amber. With a lavender and a pink in the file it stopped being defensible at all. --amber-* was removed in 2.0, not aliased — a custom property that no longer exists resolves to nothing rather than erroring, so this one fails silently and is worth grepping for. See DEPRECATED. Adding an emitter, or a whole technology, means adding one block to colors.css: five stops, three surfaces, --ac-on-fill, the four --ac-halo-N triples the glow is built from — and for the gases that block is generated by scripts/derive-gas.mjs, not typed.

The older data-ac-gas="neon" and data-ac-gas="amber" still work and go in 3.0. The name was the bug: AMBER was never a gas, it is the P3 CRT phosphor, and calling it one is exactly the confusion the pair above exists to prevent.

SEMANTIC ALIASES

TOKEN	MAPS TO	USE
--ac-ink / --ac-ink-bright	emit-90 / 100	Body text; bright for live values and hover.
--ac-ink-dim / --ac-ink-faint	emit-70 / 50	Labels and legends; faint for disabled. Neither glows — and neither does inverse video.
--ac-fill / --ac-on-fill	emit-90 / per palette	Inverse-video surfaces and the dark text on them.
--ac-stroke / --ac-stroke-dim	emit-90 / 50	All borders, always 2px. Dim for secondary frames.

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