This release focuses on theme improvements, developer control, and internal architecture improvements. It introduces a new CLI command for managing running servers, finalises the transition to the new appearance theme system, and performs a large refactor across the UI and theme layers to make docmd easier to maintain long-term.

✨ Highlights

Major UI and Theme Refactor

A substantial cleanup was performed across UI templates, CSS, and theme logic.

The goal was simple: reduce legacy complexity and standardise styling across themes.

Key improvements include:

• Container polishing: Containers look much better and consistent now, especially callouts.
• Expanded design tokens: Colours, spacing, typography, radii, and shadows are now more consistently defined.
• Improved layout structure: Better handling of content areas, sidebars, menubars, and responsive behaviour.
• Cleaner navigation system: Navigation templates were refactored for simpler active/parent logic and improved accessibility.
• Better theme toggling: Highlight stylesheets and theme switching logic were corrected and simplified.
• Lighter themes: Themes are lighter now, a lot of transitional animations are removed, making UX faster and snappier than before.

Overall this significantly reduces duplicated styling while making themes easier to extend and maintain.

New docmd stop Command

Managing running dev servers is now simpler.

A new CLI command allows you to stop active docmd servers directly from the terminal. This is particularly useful when multiple dev instances are running or when a previous process did not exit cleanly.

• Quick shutdown: Stop running servers without hunting for processes.
• CLI integration: Fully wired into the main docmd binary.
• Cleaner dev workflow: Prevents port conflicts and lingering background processes.

Theme System Migration (appearance)

The theme configuration system has been modernised.

The previous defaultMode option has been replaced with appearance, providing clearer semantics and aligning theme handling across the UI.

• Cleaner configuration: A single consistent appearance model.
• Backward compatible: Existing configs using defaultMode continue to work automatically.
• Earlier theme initialisation: Pages now initialise appearance earlier to prevent flashing during load.

📝 Complete Changelog

✨ CLI & Dev Server

• Added a new docmd stop command to terminate running docmd servers.
• Improved dev server shutdown handling for more graceful process termination.
• CLI wiring added for the new stop command.

🎨 Theme & UI System Refactor

• Large cleanup and refactor of theme CSS architecture.
• Expanded design tokens for colour, typography, spacing, borders, and shadows.
• Improved responsive layout across content areas, header, menubar, and sidebar.
• Updated code blocks, tables, cards, and callouts for visual consistency.
• Reworked navigation template logic with better active state detection and collapsible groups.
• Introduced additional structural classes for layout organisation.
• Improved accessibility attributes and navigation semantics.
• Adjusted scroll offsets, anchors, buttons, hover states, and general UI polish.

Sky

• Minor variable cleanups and alignment with the new shared layout structure.
• Adjusted background, link, border, and muted text variables.

Ruby

• Consolidated root variables and simplified theme overrides.
• Removed unnecessary shadows and layout rules.
• Standardised font and code variable usage.

Retro

• Full redesign into a cleaner Classic Computing style.
• Added Google font imports and rebuilt light/dark variables.
• Removed legacy CRT effects, scanlines, and glow animations.
• Simplified layout and improved accessibility contrast.

⚙️ Configuration & Zero-Config Improvements

• Migrated theme configuration from defaultMode to appearance.
• Maintained backward compatibility by mapping defaultMode → appearance.
• Refined zero-config navigation logic so an explicitly empty navigation is now respected.
• Prevent default plugins from being injected when plugins are explicitly defined.