Colour & style

The palette

manic uses a small set of semantic colour names. The default mono template maps all of them to distinct black-and-white luminance levels; choose plain or another colour template when hue should carry meaning. Their original neon roles are:

name	is	name	is
`cyan`	electric blue	`gold`	warm amber
`magenta`	hot pink	`red`	warm red
`lime`	green	`orange`	orange
`blue`	true blue (≠ cyan)	`dim`	muted grey-violet
`void`	the background	`fg`	near-white (default text)
`panel`	dark fill

color(sun, cyan);
recolor(sun, magenta, 0.5);   // animate to a new palette colour

Any colour, by hue

For a computed colour — a gradient, or one per item in a loop — use hue, which takes an angle from 0 to 360:

hue(sun, 200);              // a fixed hue
for i in 0..24 {
  hue(p{i}, 360*i/24);      // a full rainbow around the loop
}

That’s how the rainbow-ring loop gets its colours.

Glow

Every entity has a neon glow (0 = crisp, higher = brighter halo):

glow(sun, 8);   // strong halo
glow(grid, 0);  // crisp, no halo — good for fine detail

Easings

The optional last argument of a motion verb is the easing — the shape of the motion over time:

easing	feel
`linear`	constant speed (mechanical)
`smooth`	ease in and out (the default, natural)
`in` / `out`	accelerate / decelerate
`back`	overshoot slightly and settle
`bounce`	bounce at the end
`elastic` / `spring`	wobble / springy settle

move(p, (900, 400), 0.8, bounce);
move(p, (900, 400), 0.8, smooth);   // usually what you want

Canvas & size

canvas(...) sets the frame. Give it a preset or explicit pixels:

canvas("16:9");        // 1280x720  (also: 4:5, square, portrait/9:16, 4:3, 1080p, 4k)
canvas(1280, 720);     // explicit

portrait / 9:16 is 1080×1920 — pair it with the reel render preset for vertical / social clips.

Use --canvas portrait|4:5|square|16:9|WIDTHxHEIGHT to reframe one responsive source without changing its canvas(...) line. The override is applied before w, h, cx, cy, and build-time layout branches are evaluated.

Templates — the whole look

For the complete selection guide, CLI override rules, mono tips and a runnable black-and-white example, see Templates — choose the whole visual system.

template("...") sets the movie’s look in one call: the background, how the palette renders, the glow, and any page chrome. Put it near the top, after canvas(...).

canvas("16:9");
template("paper");     // a flat white exam-paper page

template	look
`mono` (aliases `monochrome`, `bw`)	default — black-and-white editorial, near-black page, subtle glow
`plain`	original neon palette on near-black, no chrome
`terminal`	the neon-terminal frame (border, title, masthead)
`paper` (aliases `light`, `print`)	white page, dark ink — for print / textbook figures
`blueprint` (alias `blue`)	white & cyan lines on deep navy
`shorts`	restrained dark creator palette for Shorts and Reels

Omitting template(...) is exactly the same as selecting template("mono"). Use explicit plain when an older scene should keep the original neon colours.

The clever part is the palette remap: a template doesn’t just change the background, it re-maps every named palette colour to that template’s role. So on mono, cyan, magenta, lime, gold, red, orange, and blue become carefully separated greys; on paper, panel → light box, fg → dark ink, lime → forest green, and so on — which means your existing scene renders legibly on the new page without recolouring anything. That’s why template("paper") alone turns a pulley, a spring, or a linked list into a clean textbook figure (see Elevating a scene). paper/blueprint also drop the glow for crisp print output.

hue(...) and future explicit RGB colours are intentionally bespoke, so they pass through instead of being forced to greyscale. Use the named palette colours when a scene must remain strictly monochrome.

Next: loops, variables, and macros → The language layer.

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