A new look for Pekan: warmer, denser, and a new Ember theme
Pekan has been redrawn around a warmer, more deliberate visual language. The interface moves off its blue-violet accent onto a warm neutral base with an amber accent, and the typeface changes from Geist to IBM Plex Sans, with IBM Plex Mono carrying every piece of machine data: task identifiers, dates, estimates, token counts, column counts, and branch state. That split is the point. Prose reads as prose, and anything a machine produced reads as machine output, so you can scan a column for identifiers or costs without reading a single word of a title.
The Workspace no longer stacks two header rows. Opening Tasks used to show the word Tasks twice, once in a toolbar and again in the view's own header, and the pair consumed roughly fifty vertical pixels on every screen. There is now one row per view. It carries the view name, a short monospaced summary such as twenty-eight open or two queued, whichever controls that view actually needs, and a single group holding Project context, Worktrees, and Agent setup, with Agent actions as the one accent-filled action on the row. Every view gained that space back for its own content.
Board columns now carry a coloured top rail and a compact uppercase header, and cards are tighter: a two-pixel priority tick down the leading edge, the identifier and status chips on one line, and a single monospaced footer holding assignee, dates, estimate, and tokens. The Queue was rebuilt around how it is actually used. Adding work is now a search-as-you-type field rather than a dropdown listing every open task, the whole list sits in one centred column instead of stretching across the window, and a blocked entry is marked with an amber ring and a small chip rather than recolouring the entire row.
The Roadmap colours its bars by status rather than priority, since what you scan a timeline for is what is finished, what is waiting on a human, and what is moving. A legend in the header keeps the mapping explicit, milestone rows read as full-width bands, and the today marker is now a dedicated red so it can never be mistaken for a bar.
Alongside the refreshed Light, Dark, Midnight, and Sepia themes there is a fifth: Ember. It pairs a near-black window frame (title bar, tab strip, sidebar, and status bar) with a warm charcoal canvas and a brighter amber accent, for a higher-contrast, more focused workspace. Every theme, including Ember, is checked against the same automated readability rules that guard text and control contrast, so nothing in this refresh trades legibility for style. Pick a theme in Settings.