Appearance

scoot draws no titlebars by design — a focused window gets a colored ring drawn around it (in the layout’s own gap), and there’s a solid background behind everything. This table controls the ring, the background, and the built-in pointer cursor. Everything here re-applies live by scootctl reload.

Field	Type	Default	Meaning
focus_ring_width	integer (pixels)	3	Ring thickness around the focused window, drawn around what the window actually draws (a window smaller than its slot is ringed where its content ends). Clamped to at most half of gap.
focus_ring_inactive_width	integer (pixels)	unset (same as focus_ring_width)	Ring thickness around every window that is not focused. 0 draws no ring at all on unfocused windows.
focus_ring_active_color	"#rrggbb" / "#rrggbbaa"	#6ba6fa (accent blue)	Ring color around the focused window.
focus_ring_inactive_color	"#rrggbb" / "#rrggbbaa"	#595961 (muted gray)	Ring color around every other window.
background_color	"#rrggbb" / "#rrggbbaa"	#141419 (near-black)	Cleared behind all window content — the frame clear color; what shows wherever wallpaper shows nothing.
corner_radius	integer (pixels)	0 (square)	Window corner radius in logical pixels. Rounds window content and ring together; clamped per window to half its smaller dimension. Costs a little per frame when non-zero. Popups stay square.
cursor_size	integer (pixels)	16	Both dimensions of the built-in pointer cursor (clamped 4..=256; drawn only under --tty). Also picks which size is taken out of a real cursor theme.
cursor_color	"#rrggbb" / "#rrggbbaa"	#ffffff (white)	Fill color of the built-in pointer cursor (1px black outline, not separately configurable). No effect inside a real theme’s artwork.
cursor_theme	string	unset	Which installed xcursor theme named cursor shapes are drawn from. Unset follows $XCURSOR_THEME, then default. A name matching nothing installed is not an error: named shapes come from scoot’s own drawn set.
cursor_hide_after_ms	integer (milliseconds)	0 (never hides)	How long the pointer sits still over a covering fullscreen window before scoot hides it. While hidden, frames carry no cursor elements — which is what lets a fullscreen window scan out directly on a display with no cursor plane. Next motion, button or scroll shows it again. Never arms behind the session lock.
prefer_no_csd	boolean	true	Answer decoration requests with ServerSide, so a well-behaved client stops drawing its own titlebar (which would double up with the ring).

[appearance]
focus_ring_width = 4
focus_ring_inactive_width = 2
focus_ring_active_color = "#ffaa00"
focus_ring_inactive_color = "#333333"
background_color = "#101014"
corner_radius = 8

Under home-manager with Stylix, the ring and background colors and the cursor theme and size default from the scheme instead — a value written here always wins. The three built-in color defaults are stored as raw floats no hex string reproduces exactly: leave a color field unset to get the real default; only set it to change it. (cursor_color’s #ffffff is exactly representable, the one exception.)

The look you picked in the desktop profile writes these same keys — settings.appearance.background_color = "#123456" beside a look replaces that one color and keeps the rest.