Colour & style

The palette

manic uses a small set of semantic colour names. The default black template shows their full hues on an exact black canvas. Choose mono when the scene should communicate through black-and-white luminance instead. The semantic roles are:

Aliases: pink/accent → magenta · green → lime · yellow/amber → gold · purple → violet · turquoise → teal · salmon → coral · seafoam → mint · azure → blue · crimson → red · gray/grey → dim · white → fg · bg → void.

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

Any colour, by hue

For a computed colour — 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.

Gradient paint — computed, not painted

For a colour that reads a quantity, use gradient. One word covers multi-stop ramps on fills and strokes; the mode (optional) picks the truth:

gradient(wave, blue, cyan, gold, 270);   // height of a plot
gradient(path, magenta, cyan);           // arc length along a stroke
gradient(well, panel, void, radial);     // centre → edge on a fill
gradient(p.path, blue, cyan, gold, "speed");      // true local speed (physics traj.)
gradient(swoop, dim, magenta, "curvature");       // how hard a path bends

Stops are palette names (≥2, evenly spaced) and stay template-aware. "speed" only works on pre-simulated physics trajectories; "curvature" works on any path. See the Modifiers table in Shapes, and the demos gradient, gradient-fastest-descent, and the shorts gradient-fastest-descent-shorts / gradient-pendulum-shorts.

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:

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

Omitting template(...) is exactly the same as selecting template("black"). Use mono deliberately for grayscale and plain for the original tinted neon surface.

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.